"You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone."

"I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world."

"There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing."

"A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof."

"Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie."

"A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose."

"Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry."

"It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things."

"A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music...