For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
Source: Interview in Writers at Work (Eighth Series, ed. by George Plimpton, 1988).
-- Joseph Brodsky, (May 24 1940-1996), Russian-US poet; He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 for his important lyric and elegiac poems; first foreign-born US poet laureate, 1991.