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

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" I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift. "

" I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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?' "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act. "

" 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. "

" The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I'd rather have just one person who reads and feels my work deeply than hundreds of thousands who read it but don't really care about. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it's better than anybody else's because it's yours. It's extremely provincial and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be, 'Don't read Shakespeare because he was white.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Sometimes what we call tragedy, at least in the theater, are really case histories. They're based on the central figure, and things happen to that person, and they're called tragedy because they're extremely sad. But tragedy always has a glorious thing happen at the end of it. That's what the catharsis is. "

" 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. "

" The thing a writer has to avoid is being the 'voice' of his people and pretending he can speak for them. "

" When you're young, influences count. "

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

" My relationship to Britain is of no consequence. "