Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.

I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.

Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

I'm drowning in papers.

Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.

I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom.

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.

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.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.

Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.

When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine. I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn't work, but I've never pretended it didn't happen to me.

You have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.

Such certainty is beautiful but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

Its just not easy to explain to someone else what you dont understand yourself.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One cant get lost here.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.