Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after.

When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.

The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.

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

What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can't hurt and you might get better.

The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar "queen", alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.