I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.

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.

You never can give without receiving it.

We're all stories in the end.

Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.

A lot of people don't like bumper stickers. I don't mind bumper stickers. To me a bumper sticker is a shortcut. It's like a little sign that says 'Hey, let's never hang out.'

I don’t feel in a kind of race or competition with him or anybody else, because that kind of reactive thing isn’t good, or isn’t useful for natural creative instincts

The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scripture ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws.

...music is sometimes the only benign avenue of communication between antagonists.

I'm really into production and I'm also into producing my own sound because the sonics, in a way, is the language.

The world that has made us can no longer contain us

The gym is always open, except when it's closed.