It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

Man is what he reads.

Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

A man is, after all, what he loves. But one always feels cornered when asked to explain why one loves this or that person, and what for. In order to explain it - which inevitably amounts to explaining oneself - one has to try to love the object of one's attention a little bit less.

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave - as he thinks at that moment - a trace on the earth.

A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around.

A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.

A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.

A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.

After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.

Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.

American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.

American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.

Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.

An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.

Any dispute in matters of taste usually results in a standoff.

Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.

Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.

As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like claiming to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.

Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.

Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language.

Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times, he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected; often his thought carries further than he reckoned.

Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or on main drags, but at the assembly plant's gates, also.

By and large, prisons are survivable, though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a lump of sugar would be more useful.

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan... In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.

By writing... in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society's job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and read it.

Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.

English is the only interesting thing that's left in my life.

Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.