I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars.

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.

An entrepreneurial spirit makes you someone who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business enterprise, talent or calling to become an agent of change.

We take unholy risks to prove we are what we cannot be. For instance, I am not even crazy.

Being in the studio is a really romantic time.

If you are always allowed to stop training whenever you feel discomfort, you will find it too easy to give yourself permission to quit.

Man ought always to have something that he prefers to life; otherwise life itself will seem to him tiresome and void.

Things that would shock us years ago are like nothing now.

The secret of a happy life lies in renunciation. Renunciation is life.

And what exotic part of the world do you come from?

It is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.

First teach a person to develop to the point of his limitation and then-pfft!-break the limitation.