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Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting.
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Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.
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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
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The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.
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The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness.
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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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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.
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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.
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I have to live, socially, in an almost unfinished society. Among the almost great, among the almost true, among the almost honest. That allows me to describe the anguish.
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I don't want to write poems about the royal wedding. I would have to be moved by the event.
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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.
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The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
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I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.
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Minor writers think style is all.
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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.
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Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.
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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.
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There are certain functions that a writer has to do. In a time of crisis, it is great to have heroic poems, as it was in the Irish Revolution. It's great to have great songs, because people need something to sing when they are marching. That's OK, but it should be on the side. It's not the ultimate thing.
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I'm read in the Caribbean with justice, with fairness. What I expect it to do is to encourage articulacy in the young.
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I don't know what would have happened to me as a writer if I had gone to England and shaped my life out of England. Of course, I will never know, but I think I prefer what did happen.
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I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.
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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.
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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.
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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.