I never write when I'm drunk. Why should one need aids? The Muse is a high-spirited girl who doesn't like to be brutally or coarsely wooed. And she doesn't like slavish devotion - then she lies.

A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corr…

I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.

It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, 'What should I write at the age of sixty-four,' bu…