When it was time for parent-teacher conferences, I remember that I was always embarrassed about what my parents would hear about me!

For me, when I was a kid, volunteering was the last thing I was thinking about. When I see kids doing it now, it amazes me. It's very impressive, it gives them something productive to do as opposed to getting in trouble. For them to take time out at such a young age is remarkable. I think all kids should take a little time out to volunteer.

I've always been very aware of what I'm saying, but I'm also aware of what you're saying. I always want to make sure that my point is clear.

The first thing to know about playing baseball in Michigan is, Michigan's really cold.

I always appreciated the ex-players. Being a Yankee, you get spoiled. Old-Timers Day, all these guys coming back, spring training, being around them, you get a chance to get to know them. So I always think you learn a lot by listening.

During the off-season, I go to the movies almost every day.

You hear about women buying shoes? I buy DVDs. I definitely have a problem.

I get asked enough questions, I try not to ask too many questions.

I try to stay as private as possible; I know that's difficult, especially playing here in New York, but I make an attempt at it.

I think, a lot of times, players get in trouble when they're asked questions and they think they have to find a way to answer it. If you ask me a question and I say, 'I don't know,' there's really no follow-up.

I voted for Obama.

No former player has owned a team in baseball.

I want to have a family.

I have feelings. I'm not emotionally stunted.

I've never been an actor on Broadway, but it feels like you're on a stage when you play at Yankee Stadium. And that's the feeling I've always had.

I don't really see myself getting a Twitter account. Nothing against it. I get it. I especially get it for businesses.

Kids are our future.

Any player that says they don't want to go to an All-Star Game is lying to you. It's something everyone wants to be a part of.

I've always been uncomfortable, so to speak, when the focus is on me.

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

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

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.

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

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

There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise.

The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I virtually had it all to myself, including the language that was spoken there, which was a French Creole, and a landscape that is not recorded, really, and the people.

I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body.

My delight in things is definitely Caribbean. It has to do with landscape and food. The fact that my language may have a metrical direction is because that's the shape of the language. I didn't make that shape.

Where I come from, we sing poetry.

The older I get, the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts.

A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is.

The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.

The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.

I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.

I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift.

My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been thirty-one. Then there was my twin brother and my sister. We had two aunts as well, my father's sisters. But the immediate family consisted of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me.

I'm from the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean in the Lesser Antilles, the lower part of the archipelago, which is a bilingual island - French, Creole, and English - but my education is in English.

There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets' Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English poetry. The most compelling aspect of his work was his intimacy with nature.

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.

For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I have tried to give that world an exposure so the world can better understand it.

There's always a need at a critical time for poetry.

The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness.

The painter I really thought I could learn from was Cezanne - some sort of resemblance to oranges and greens and browns of the dry season in St. Lucia.

There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical.

All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.

Ted Hughes is dead. That's a fact, OK. Then there's something called the poetry of Ted Hughes. The poetry of Ted Hughes is more real, very soon, than the myth that Ted Hughes existed - because that can't be proven.

My mother, who is nearly ninety now, still talks continually about my father. All my life, I've been aware of her grief about his absence and her strong pride in his conduct.

There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame.

My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty.

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.