"The baby was plump and pretty as a ripe ox-heart tomato. Her mother, Margaret Wilson Harvey, gently squeezed the soft…"

"my own memoir is a history of Jamaica; it’s my attempt to show that history happens to real people; how history affec…"

"My particular role, as I see it, is to accurately represent my people. I have this real concern about how sometimes J…"

"once I started reading, I was taken with the idea of what could happen to you once you read something. I don’t actual…"

"Jamaicans are very comical people, and laughter is a way of coping with life’s displeasures. Also, when you make some…"

"I think a lot of my poems have been trying to make these gestures, you know, to say 'I'm a human being, and I have so…"

"When all of this is over, I want to have done something that I really think means something to people: something that…"

"You know, the Emily Dickinson litmus test: if I read a poem and I feel so cold as if no fire will ever warm me, or if…"

"I see myself in a tradition of praise singers. (2004, in Writing across worlds)"

"I love words, I really love the pleasure and consolation you get from words. Words can be nourishing or medicinal or …"