Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.

In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

Nothing is ever behind us.

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

You run risks. That's the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny's whims.

The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.