The poet does not fear death, not because he believes in the fantasy of heroes, but because death constantly visits his thoughts and is thus an image of a serene dialogue.

Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.

Europeans know the importance of the Resistance; it has been the shining example of the modern conscience.

The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.

After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question.

From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.

We wrote verses that condemned us, with no hope of pardon, to the most bitter solitude.

The soul keeps on wandering!

Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.

Always love, always encourage, and never let despair get in the way.

Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life.

To say that a thing is beautiful is simply an act of faith, not a measurement on some kind of scale.

Sometimes you want to dress a certain way... that doesn't always reflect your pedigree.

Little pitchers have big ears.

It is not surprising that prayer malfunctions when we try to make it a domestic intercom to call upstairs for more comforts in the den.

McCarthy generally, as an individual, was a liberal. He was, in economic philosophy and a lot of other things, extremely liberal.

My dream is for people around the world to look up and to see Canada like a little jewel sitting at the top of the continent.