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.Collection: Faith
Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.Collection: Knowledge
In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.Collection: Poetry
Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.Collection: Poetry
Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.Collection: Respect
I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom.Collection: Wisdom
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.Collection: Poetry
All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.Collection: Imagination
Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
I don't believe I have a mission. Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.
When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine. I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn't work, but I've never pretended it didn't happen to me.
I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.
I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.
'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun.
Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.
Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.
Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.
Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.
Generally speaking, life is so rich and full of variety; you have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.
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.
Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?
Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.
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!
Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.
Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists. There is, there has been, there will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem that they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.'Collection: Jobs
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.Collection: Writing