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" In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't. "

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" My relationship to Britain is of no consequence. "

" 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. "

" I'm from the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean in the Lesser Antilles, the lower part of the archipelago, which is a bilingual island - French, Creole, and English - but my education is in English. "

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

" The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I virtually had it all to myself, including the language that was spoken there, which was a French Creole, and a landscape that is not recorded, really, and the people. "

" When you're young, influences count. "

" 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.' "

" What I described in 'Another Life' - about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened - is a frequent experience in a younger writer. "

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

" Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting. "

" I am not in England; I live in the Caribbean. So I am not hungover by prizes and awards because it does not happen very often. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I knew very early what I wanted to do, and I considered myself lucky to know that's what I wanted, even in a place like Saint Lucia where there was no publishing house and no theatre. "

" A long time ago, I thought, as a writer in the Caribbean, 'I don't ever want to have to write 'It was great in Paris.'' Because I don't think, proportionately speaking, that one's experience in a city as opposed to, say, a village in St. Lucia, is superior to the other. "

" Rhyme is an attempt to reassemble and reaffirm the possibility of paradise. There is a wholeness, a serenity, in sounds coupling to form a memory. "

" My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act. "

" Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral. "

" 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. "

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

" How does a poet teach himself or herself? I think chiefly by imitation, chiefly by practising it as a deliberate technical exercise often. Translation, imitation, those were my methods anyway. "

" The older I get, the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts. "

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

" Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic. "

" There are certain functions that a writer has to do. In a time of crisis, it is great to have heroic poems, as it was in the Irish Revolution. It's great to have great songs, because people need something to sing when they are marching. That's OK, but it should be on the side. It's not the ultimate thing. "

" There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical. "

" The painter I really thought I could learn from was Cezanne - some sort of resemblance to oranges and greens and browns of the dry season in St. Lucia. "

" There's always a need at a critical time for poetry. "

" Anybody great, we're all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it. "

" I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad. "