The writer is always to some extent in exile, wherever he is, because he is somehow outside, separated from others; there is always a distance.

If an animal has to be sacrificed when a new bridge is built, what will it take to build a whole new world?

It was only a phrase that went from mouth to mouth and was never quite swallowed.

The days were heavy and sticky. All identical, one the same as the other. Soon they would even get rid of their one remaining distinction, the shell of their names: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

And everything would be different, different.

A mountaineer’s house, before being his home and the home of his family, is the home of God and of guests.

Shiny musical instruments wailed, their mouths open like lilies.

Winter hurled more wind and rain at the city than it ever had before. Clouds dashed about in all directions emptying their thunder, hail and rain. The horizon was choked in fog.

Can a country's people be better than its planes?

Can one move an empire as if it were a house?

May God deliver us from every sinful nature of the soulful flesh.

Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion.

After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.

Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.” - Chinese proverb

Some of our jokes we made up on the fly. I love Lecrae; we have been friends for a while and he is just one of my favorite people.

Try to keep them, poet, those erotic visions of yours, however few of them there are that can be stilled. Put them, half-hidden, in your lines.

Where neither love nor hatred is in the game, a woman's game is mediocre.

The first sign of extravagance is to buy trousers that one does not need.

Where combination is possible, competition is impossible.

I think that feminists have definitely underestimated the role that women have had historically. I think I would be insecure if I were to be a man; there's so much pressure on you.