Eugenio Montale

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

Too many lives are needed to make just one.

I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life.

I am perhaps a late follower of Zoroaster and I believe that the foundation of life is built upon the struggle between the two opposing forces of Good and Evil.

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering light, to the feet, thin ice that cracks; and so may no one touch you who loves you.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.