It turns out that a Nobel is also followed by other recognitions, and perhaps the most unexpected of these is that the Japan Karate Association in Tokyo has now made me an honorary 7th-degree black belt, something that, given my athletic abilities, is even more unimaginable than being an Economic Sciences Laureate.
Me
God made me and broke the mold.
The Huron and Iroquois forests are peopled by my friends; with me, the despots of Europe and their courts are the savages.
It is not enough for me to ask question; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?
If I were to ask you for example right now to go back with me and define those moments in your life that shaped you as a person and you began to reexamine them, something would happen.
But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.
When we arrived in London, my sadness at leaving Paris was turned into despair. After my long stay in the French capital, huge, ponderous, massive London seemed to me as ugly a thing as man could contrive to make.
Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line – to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.
If I am 100% prepared for the fight, my opponent has no chance to win the fight. I am saying what I mean: He has a 0% chance to win the fight. There is going to be no luck involved; there is going to be nothing else to stop me from winning the fight.