How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

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

Man is what he reads.

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

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.

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

One of the worst things that can happen to an artist is to perceive himself as the owner of his art, and art as his tool. A product of the marketplace sensibility, this attitude barely differs on a psychological plane from the patron's view of the artist as a paid employee.

I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.

This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic.

To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.

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

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.

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.

My idea is simply - is very simple - is that the books of poetry should be published in far greater volume and be distributed in far greater volume, in far more substantial manner. You can sell in supermarkets very cheaply. In paperbacks. You can sell in drugstores.

I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.

Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.

If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.

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

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

Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.

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.

Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.

The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.

Bad politics make for bad morals.

I belong to the Russian language. As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives.

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?