One day I was living silently in a personal hell, without anyone to tell what I felt, without even knowing that the feelings I had were possible to have; and then one day I was not living like that at all. I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be and things you used to do. Your past is the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in.

People don't make changes because things are wonderful.

I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life.

On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.

I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn't know that it was possible.

Had the Holocaust happened in Tahiti or the Congo, as it has; had it happened in South America, as it has; had it happened in the West Indies, as it has - you must remember that within fifty years of Columbus's arrival, only the bones remained of the people called the Arawaks, with one or two of them in Spain as specimens. Had the Holocaust committed under the Nazis happened somewhere else, we wouldn't be talking about it the way we talk about it.

It's too easy to say this or that is "race," and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.