Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness.
I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.
I don't want to write poems about the royal wedding. I would have to be moved by the event.
The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.
I can't tear up a poem and be a sound bite for you. Why is that so hard for anyone to understand?
The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.
I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift.
The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.
As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body.
There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame.
I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad.
Anybody great, we're all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it.
There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical.
Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
I'm read in the Caribbean with justice, with fairness. What I expect it to do is to encourage articulacy in the young.
In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.
I don't think there is any such thing as a black writer or a white writer. Ultimately, there is someone whom one reads.
My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was '25 Poems.' It cost 200 dollars.
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.
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.
My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race.
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.
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.
The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.
The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed?
The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it.
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.
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.
Americans are not brought up with meter. They're not brought up with poetry. If you try to get them to recite, they're too embarrassed.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Rhyme is an attempt to reassemble and reaffirm the possibility of paradise. There is a wholeness, a serenity, in sounds coupling to form a memory.
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.
Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting.
My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a writer; both me and my brother wrote.
The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome.
I write plays and poetry at the same time, and I'm always refining, but I'm not obsessive about it. It's what I like to do, what I've always wanted to do.
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.
Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire poesia "Metamorfosi, I. Luna
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.
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.