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" My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race. "

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

" I think young writers ought to be heretical. "

" As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is. "

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

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

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

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

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

" If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average. "

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

" I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem - is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can't act a myth. "

" 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. "

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

" I was writing from a very, very early age. My father used to write. He died early, and my mother was a schoolteacher, so my academic background from childhood is a strong one, a good one. "

" 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. "

" Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole. "

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

" 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. "

" The headmaster asked to read one of my poems at some celebration or other when I was about 10. When I look back, that is phenomenal encouragement. "

" The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was '25 Poems.' It cost 200 dollars. "

" Miscegenation is not an idea that we would have in the Caribbean. It wouldn't come up because anybody could marry anybody, you know. I'm not saying that there aren't prejudices in the Caribbean, but the idea of the word 'miscegenation' is not something that we think of. "

" 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. "

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