“Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the ki...”

“Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal.”

“Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.”

“She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?' 'I don't expect attractive men necessarily to...”

“Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.”

“I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation....”

“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who k...”

“Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.”