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" 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. "

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" My relationship to Britain is of no consequence. "

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

" 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. "

" There's a ritualistic element to tragedy that everyone shares; there's something curiously glorious in terms of the most horrible kind of events that happen. "

" The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things. "

Material Things

" I can't tear up a poem and be a sound bite for you. Why is that so hard for anyone to understand? "

" I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I'd gone to England. I might have developed a cynicism about my origins, a belittling of them, or an excessive nostalgia for them. "

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

" Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in a sense, without doing it, they are crossing themselves; I mean, it's like the habit of Catholics going into water: you cross yourself before you go in. "

" 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. "

" There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets' Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English poetry. The most compelling aspect of his work was his intimacy with nature. "

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

" 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. "

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

" My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act. "

" My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a writer; both me and my brother wrote. "

" I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. "

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

" I didn't pass the scholarship exam for Oxford because of poor mathematics. "

" I think, at the heart of the idea of American democracy, there is something tender. "

" The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it. "

" The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island. "

" 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 have no curiosity. I'm an island boy. "

" The Chinese, the African, and the European - they are all there. So the division of the Caribbean experience into being emphatically only African is absurd. "

" 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. "

" I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures. It is not inhibited by flourish. It is a rhetorical society. It is a society of physical performance. It is a society of style. "

" 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. "

" I have to live, socially, in an almost unfinished society. Among the almost great, among the almost true, among the almost honest. That allows me to describe the anguish. "

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