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" A culture, we all know, is made by its cities. "

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" When a child's mind develops and is heading in a certain direction, we murder that mentality, we murder that imagination, by saying, 'Now, that is all well and good, but now sit down and start to study.' "

" I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet. "

" My body's urge is to be in a pair of shorts, working and going down to the beach. "

" The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings. "

" My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act. "

" If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history. "

" I don't think there is any such thing as a black writer or a white writer. Ultimately, there is someone whom one reads. "

" 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 greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness. "

" The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed? "

" The thing a writer has to avoid is being the 'voice' of his people and pretending he can speak for them. "

" The myth of Naipaul... has long been a farce. "

" When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature. "

" I am not defined as a black writer in the Caribbean, but as soon as I go to America or the U.K., my place becomes black theatre. It's a little ridiculous. "

" My mother, who is nearly ninety now, still talks continually about my father. All my life, I've been aware of her grief about his absence and her strong pride in his conduct. "

" My delight in things is definitely Caribbean. It has to do with landscape and food. The fact that my language may have a metrical direction is because that's the shape of the language. I didn't make that shape. "

" I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry. "

" I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer. "

" I don't believe that poetry is in danger because nobody wants to read it or appreciate it. There is a tremendous audience for it on any given day or night. You just have to know where to look. "

" I don't want to write poems about the royal wedding. I would have to be moved by the event. "

" If music goes out of language, then you are in bad trouble. "

" Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful. "

" After a while, when the writer is mature, it doesn't really matter - not because of finances but because of reputation. It doesn't really matter how many awards you get. "

" I don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big. "

" I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don't affect your work. "

" The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it. "

" I hate all that nonsense about not touching the colonialists' language. All that about it being corrupting and belonging to the master and making you Caliban. That thinking just denies you an outlet. You deny everything that is great from a language, whether it is Conrad or Shakespeare. "

" Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven. "

" I write plays and poetry at the same time, and I'm always refining, but I'm not obsessive about it. It's what I like to do, what I've always wanted to do. "

" I go back to St. Lucia, and the exhilaration I feel is not simply the exhilaration of homecoming and of nostalgia. It is almost an irritation of feeling: 'Well, you never got it right. Now you have another chance. Maybe you can try and look harder.' "