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" When you're young, influences count. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" Minor writers think style is all. "

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

" I don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big. "

" 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. "

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

" My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act. "

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

" Where I come from, we sing poetry. "

" The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it. "

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

Material Things

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

" For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I have tried to give that world an exposure so the world can better understand it. "

" How does a poet teach himself or herself? I think chiefly by imitation, chiefly by practising it as a deliberate technical exercise often. Translation, imitation, those were my methods anyway. "

" 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. "

" I think young writers ought to be heretical. "

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

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

" I am not defined as a black writer in the Caribbean, but as soon as I go to America or the U.K., my place becomes black theatre. It's a little ridiculous. "

" 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. "

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

" When a child's mind develops and is heading in a certain direction, we murder that mentality, we murder that imagination, by saying, 'Now, that is all well and good, but now sit down and start to study.' "

" 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. "

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