I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.

When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.

The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.

That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.