The mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there.

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.

To tell a ghost story means being willing to be haunted.

Examples, not educators, educate the best.

The sinning is the best part of repentance.

Laziness. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.

From here on out, I am only interested in what is real. Real people, real feelings, that's it. That's all I'm interested in.

In truth, making films doesn't feel like hard work because I always have such a good time doing it.

You can't take it with you. There are no pockets in a shroud.

I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.

I was like, "If I don't change my mind, if I don't change my heart, if I don't develop some skill, I'm always going to be sleeping in my car."