All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maidens?

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position ... The stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows up, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation.