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

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.

All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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'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.

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.

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

I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.

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

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

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.

The older I get, the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts.

Where I come from, we sing 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.

I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body.

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.

There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise.