In the 70s I was in exile; every time I went back I wondered if they'd take my passport away.

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.

Be vigilant, for nothing one achieves lasts forever.

What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.

People must insist on the right to say no, to be alone, to stand out from the herd. Creative artists can say all this in their own way and in their own field, by hard, rigorous work.

The mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors and fanaticism of human beings.