“When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, The 'Leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself.”

“Now I climb the steps to freedom,
The open gates, I can see them.
Hands once I knew
Beckoning me through,
As the sunlight touch my face,
I can feel the warm embrace;
Arms surround me,
My life has found me…”

“Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.”

“I dedicate this book to the man who inspired it — to the man who of all men past and present that I have known has the most exalted moral nature — to Walt Whitman.”

“Influence is strange. Because one can be influenced powerfully in every way but technique. For instance, I would think Walt Whitman probably had more influence on my whole poetic thinking than anybody, but I never dreamed of trying to write in the Whitman manner.”

“In the whole period, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, the greatest American poet is Stuart Merrill.”

“Open your eyes at last and see… now I will open the book of the world for you, there are no words in it, just pictures.”

“Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.”

“I can't pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.”

“I loved playing an open hand against all the Jewish political functionaries … For me, 'open hand' is a winged word.”