I don't go to see bands any more because I've got tinnitus, so I have to avoid loud music. You get used to it, but when it's quiet you hear a constant ringing.

Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.

Back in those early days when I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I also tried to voice our anger, spirit of defiance and resistance in a Jamaican poetic idiom.

The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man.

Once you have a disease like cancer, you look at life a bit differently. Some things that were important no longer seem as important as they were.

I have never, ever sought validation from the arbiters of British poetic taste.

At the end of the day, life's about realising one's human potential. I don't know if I've realised mine, but I've certainly gone a long way towards realising some goals and some dreams.

The warrior of the night intercedes for the people.

Quoting Shakespeare doesn't make you an intellectual. It just makes you a fan of Shakespeare.

I have a lot of girlfriends who are struggling out there to find good men.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.

Where you stand should not depend on where you sit.

The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.

If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "No" to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses.

Gaze steadfastly at things which, though far away, are yet present to the mind.

A mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.