A magical portal opened inside my mind and conducted me into an astonishing world. ... Before this moment I had divined but had never known with such positiveness that the world is extremely large and that suffering and toil are the companions and fellow warriors not only of Cretan, but of every man. ... that by means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song.

Every word is an adamantine shell which encloses a great explosive force. To discover its meaning you must let it burst inside you like a bomb and in this way …

I felt that human partitions - bodies, brains, and souls - were capable of being demolished, and that humanity might return again, after frightfully bloody wan…

I thank God that this refreshing childhood vision still lives inside me in all its fullness of color and sound. This is what keeps my mind untouched by wastage…

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong; They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

The lesson is that dying men must groan; And poets groan in rhymes that please the ear.