Evidently the arts, all the visual arts, are becoming more democratic in the worst sense of the word.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.

The real history, the one that counts and is not to be found in books, is precisely this one, the one made by simple men; and it is the only one that rules the world.

It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?

The poet does not know -- often he will never know -- whom he really writes for.

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

Holidays -- Have no pity.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.

The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.