I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?

Americans are not brought up with meter. They're not brought up with poetry. If you try to get them to recite, they're too embarrassed.

We look and see what we see in a mirror, and we believe it. That's important, the question of belief. The question is: Should we believe what we see in a mirror?

The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .

The English language is nobody's special property.

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.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.