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

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.

I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.

From kindness comes courage.

You have to be brave when you are stupid

We were so poor; the ultimate luxury in our house at the time was ashtrays without advertisements.

I didn't really get London until I read Dickens. Then I was charmed to death by it.

The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.

If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

You’re never going to be the same person you are right now.

What once made you safe now drives you insane.

When I was in high school, I was really into string theory and superstring theory and read 'Scientific American.' It's fascinating.

It is one thing to lead by example with half a dozen soldiers at your back. It is wholly another with ten thousand.