A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lament… - Susan Sontag

to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.

Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle.