Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.