"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 …"

"It's terrific that there are these women writers, Caribbean writers, emerging. They're emerging the same way that the…"