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" 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. "

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

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

" Ted Hughes is dead. That's a fact, OK. Then there's something called the poetry of Ted Hughes. The poetry of Ted Hughes is more real, very soon, than the myth that Ted Hughes existed - because that can't be proven. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" What was moving, I think, was the fact that the statue is a woman and not a heroic, manly figure. So for all her scale and immensity, there's something soft about the Statue of Liberty, something tender about her. "

" 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. "

" When you're young, influences count. "

" I think young writers ought to be heretical. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Poets are always making waves. I mean, you know, in an ideal situation, the ideal republic can't tolerate poets because - it isn't that they mutter and criticize; it is that the poet does not accept the situation called the 'perfect' condition of man - in other words, perfect in the materialistic sense. "

" I grew up in a place in which, if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it. "

" My relationship to Britain is of no consequence. "

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

Material Things

" There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame. "

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

" Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. "

" 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. "

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

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