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

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" Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has 12 syllables in a line, the challenge is, 'How can I interpret the meaning and contain it without going one syllable over?' "

" I'm read in the Caribbean with justice, with fairness. What I expect it to do is to encourage articulacy in the young. "

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

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

" 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. "

" You can't read to yourself. It's your inner ear that hears a poem. If you hear a poet read his own work, it becomes very exciting. The melody is a great part of it. "

" 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. "

" My relationship to Britain is of no consequence. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" When you're young, influences count. "

" Where I come from, we sing poetry. "

" This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo. "

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

" 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 made a vow that I wouldn't be tempted by what could happen to me if I went to Europe. I thought, 'You could be absorbed in it - it's so seductive, you might lose your own search for identity.' Then, when I did finally go to Europe, I was able to resist it because I had established my own identity. "

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

" Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves. "

" You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp. "

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

" 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. "

" My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been thirty-one. Then there was my twin brother and my sister. We had two aunts as well, my father's sisters. But the immediate family consisted of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me. "

" 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. "

" Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next. "