Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.

Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe. I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

The act of reading will enrich your life.Become a lifelong learner and a reader.

There is no middle ground in Hollywood you're a failure or you're a success. That mentality is wild.

All forms of human happiness contain within themselves the seeds of their own decomposition.

Equal Justice Under The Law. That is a great goal. But that goal has not been realized.

You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.

I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.

I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.

Letting ourselves be loved by God is the place where we stumble upon trust.

The biggest lie in choosing is, "I can't." That is simply not true. We can do anything we want If we don't do something, it is because we have committed our time, energy and resources somewhere else.

I have come East to find what the public likes.