“Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!”

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.

Dying – you can’t do that to a cat.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.

Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.

I’m drowning in papers.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.

At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind.

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

I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.

Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.

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

God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.

My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.

Maybe he is a one kind of a poem in a form of a body.

Write me as if I were already a poem. Pen the stanzas as if storms and ships could birth something sacred. Color it a religious experience.

For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.

When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn’t write anything.

The fact that Saigyo composed a poem that begins, “I shall be unhappy without loneliness,” shows that he made loneliness his master.

He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to completes ten is a master.

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.