"(Q: advice for struggling writers?) OS: Keep at it. Writing is a craft like any other and you get better with practice. Have faith in yourself but dampen unrealistic expectations. Remember that words are your raw material – love them, acquire them, use then, lose them when necessary. Read widely. Question what you are reading. What works? What doesn’t? How does the author achieve certain effects? This is a good way to learn. (2014)"

"I am not a scrupulous plotter of fiction or poetry – I write intuitively, thinking for a long time about my subject and also allowing my unconscious to work on it until the day comes when it seems ready to be written. (2014)"

"...Swimming? In the Ba'ma grass? Who ever heard of such a thing and a big man at that? (beginning of "Swimming in the Ba'ma Grass")"

"I think I'm an odd kind of Caribbean writer in the sense that I don't come out of the rich, middle-class elite who are the traditional writers. It's almost like cloning themselves, you know. So what they write is very much their image of the world. There's never been a voice that's been a poor voice, and I've never, ever seen myself reflected in Jamaican fiction. To some extent in Olanda Paterson, but very little. All of them, including Olive Senior, can't get into the psyche [of poor people] because they don't know it and it's an alien place, something they are afraid of. And so what happens is that they create a distorted image of people like me and my family."

"I think that there are three major influences on my work. One is that I had what would have been called a classical English education, which it was at the time I went to school. So, of course, I grew up on this diet of Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley and, you know, the great English classics. So I think that has influenced my work. I also grew up on the bible, and I regard the oral tradition as having played a very important part in shaping my work. And when I talk about the oral tradition I'm talking about not just the content but the rhythms, because a lot of our games in school, for instance, were based on rhythm and physical dexterity-you know, clapping and all this kind of thing. Everything was performed to rhythm: the floor was cleaned to rhythm, the clothes were washed to rhythm - you just couldn't escape this. Therefore, I feel that all of these things are coming together in my writing, because I am very conscious of rhythm in my prose as well. I think I have a good ear. It's all there in my head, all these sounds. And of course, I've read, and read, and read, and read, all my life."

"I am very conscious as a writer of removing myself and my personal concerns from what is going on in the text. I try to become these people that I am writing about; I assume various personas. The other question is whether or not I see myself a griot. I see myself as making things possible for my characters, like setting the stage and giving these unknown people from history the chance to speak to the other world. But I, personally, do not assume any roles for myself; that is not what I want to be. I want to be the archeologist, to dig and to bring up these things and say to the world, "Here they are." And let people draw whatever conclusion they want from it. But I don't see myself taking an activist role or playing or assuming a role that is mystical or ordained or anything like that."

"I haven't done research for any specific poem, but my writing is not separate from my life; and I have spent my entire life doing research (if you want to put it that way) in order to answer all the fundamental questions we ask about ourselves in the first place, starting with the existential questions like "who am I?" But that, of course, inevitably leads into "who are we?" And that, in turn, leads into "where are we coming from?" And it seems to me that this is my engagement, which is an engagement with history-both a personal and an ancestral history, but also with a wider notion of history: the history of the Caribbean, and indeed of the so-called New World."

"I also think that one of the things that has shaped my sensibilities as a writer is the intense beauty of the country in which I grew up. I have internalized this landscape; the mountains, in particular, the valleys... Those are the profound elements that have shaped me: the fact that we lived with trees as a part of the social fabric of our lives-with plants-and the fact that we lived in this intensely beautiful landscape. Not lost on me as a child was the fact that it masked a lot of hardship and pain and so on."