I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible.

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.

I'd have to be really quick to describe clouds - a split second's enough for them to start being something else.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.

I've had the good fortune to read a lot of great American writers in translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes, yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of 20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was the origin of things, someone with a completely different outlook. But I think that he's the father of the new wave in the world's poetry which to this very day is hitting the shore.

Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still