At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind.
I am a tarsier and a tarsier’s son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out...
And whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done.
I’m working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.
My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.
Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.
God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.
Something doesn’t start at its usual time. Something doesn’t happen as it should. Someone was always, always here, then suddenly disappeared and stubbornly stays disappeared.
We’re extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.
They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me, anyway.
Today when two people decide upon a thoughtless and precipitate abbreviation of the physical space between them, they think, at least at that moment, that they’re mutually attracted and drawn together by an overwhelming force.
It’s a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor’s orders, you have to be healthy as a horse.
I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
I’m drowning in papers.
Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.
Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.
Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds – a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.