A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.
After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed’s dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.
In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense.
When the eye fails to find beauty-alias solace-it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness.
Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
If one’s fated to be born in Caesar’s Empire, let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore...
What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
The Constitution doesn’t mention rain.
I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
Perhaps art is simply an organism’s reaction against its retentive limitations.
There’s nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.
Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.
Racism? But isn’t it only a form of misanthropy?
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.
What should I say about life? That it’s long and abhors transparence.
I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.
A man should know about himself two or three things: whether he is a coward; whether he is an honest man or given to lies; whether he is an ambitious man. One should define oneself first of all in those terms, and only then in terms of culture, race, creed.
If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.