I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.

I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men.

If each one of us could make just one other happy, the whole world would know happiness.

If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.

For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.

I write fast, because I have not the brains to write slow.

Focus on making yourself better, not thinking you are better.

Trust GOD with the life He gave you

Suddenly, I find the most beautiful smiles in your eyes.

I don't want to be movie-star famous. I want to move people with my writing.

A lizard in the spring - hear his darling sing. A bird with wings to fly - go back to his darling weep and moan till he dies. A mole in the ground - root a mountain down.

If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being.

It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.

Another thing I liked about my Dad at church: he did his sleeping at home. He never used the church as an adult nursery.

And then, strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a girl, it is boldness.

You can't be a poet certainly of my generation and not have deep in your animal brain the comment of William Carlos Williams, no ideas except in things.