WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

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

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.

'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun.

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

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

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

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.

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

You have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.

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

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

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.

I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.

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.

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.