The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they're not.

Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.

I'm very aware that we make these decisions toward love or hate every day. I certainly don't have the stamina to live through each day making only the noblest decisions.

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

It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.

It's not that I'm a very good person. It's that I think I should at least look at the ways in which I am not a good person, the ways in which I so readily become the person who would not notice that the wonderful clothing I'm wearing someone is probably dying for.

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.