If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
