Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can't write drunk.
I read; I travel; I become
There's always more to see.
The poem is itself a mirror.
We read, we travel, we become.
What are men? Children who doubt.
Minor writers think style is all.
How can I turn from Africa and live?
When you're young, influences count.
All of Victorian verse is pentameter.
Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
I have no curiosity. I'm an island boy.
Time is the metre, memory the only plot.
The thing that is believed is a reality.
In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
The classics can console. But not enough.
The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
I think young writers ought to be heretical.
My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act.
The myth of Naipaul... has long been a farce.
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.
I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer.
My relationship to Britain is of no consequence.
The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
To change your language you must change your life.
The English language is nobody's special property.
There's always a need at a critical time for poetry.
The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body.
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.
Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
Who cares about a kid from the Midwest writing pentameter? It's stupid.
I don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big.
Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.
I didn't pass the scholarship exam for Oxford because of poor mathematics.
When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.
Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.
I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars.
My body's urge is to be in a pair of shorts, working and going down to the beach.
I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
I think, at the heart of the idea of American democracy, there is something tender.
The mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there.
The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.