[Cesar] Vallejo was at least metaphorically killed by fascist forces, in the sense that he wore himself out raising funds for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and got sick and died.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

No healthy mind could bring itself to torture another human being.

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.

I have played a few times in Barcelona, including the fantastic Olympic Stadium. It's undoubtedly one of my favourite cities in terms of the people, arts, food, architecture and design.

I love gardening, and I love cooking. I love things like that. I love creating things.

Has it ever occurred to you that nothing occurs to God?

Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.

Our cultural dilemma has nothing to do with children who don't read very well. It lies instead in the difficulty of finding a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life.

Respond to your customer's dissatisfactions with precision and power.

The United States being in Asia is unambiguously a good thing for the region.

From an aunt, long ago: "Death has come for me many times but finds me always in my lovely garden and leaves me there, I think, as an excuse to return.