My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.

To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible.

Man may be considered as a superior species of animal that produces philosophies and poems in about the same way a silkworm produces their cocoons and bees their hives