All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.

No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.

Well, one is inspired by the whole of life, one's own and somebody else's. You know how sometimes you hear great music, and music is completely untranslatable into words, into any words. A certain tension that is born when one listens to music could aid you in expressing something absolutely different.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.