You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.

When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.

I go back to St. Lucia, and the exhilaration I feel is not simply the exhilaration of homecoming and of nostalgia. It is almost an irritation of feeling: 'Well, you never got it right. Now you have another chance. Maybe you can try and look harder.'

I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures. It is not inhibited by flourish. It is a rhetorical society. It is a society of physical performance. It is a society of style.

I grew up in a place in which, if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it.

I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem - is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can't act a myth.

My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race.

Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.

What I described in 'Another Life' - about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened - is a frequent experience in a younger writer.

I have to live, socially, in an almost unfinished society. Among the almost great, among the almost true, among the almost honest. That allows me to describe the anguish.

I didn't pass the scholarship exam for Oxford because of poor mathematics.

What makes a poem is the discipline inherent in making a poem: trying to fit feelings in the requisite number of syllables and lines, disciplining one's feelings.

If music goes out of language, then you are in bad trouble.

When you're young, influences count.

I'm read in the Caribbean with justice, with fairness. What I expect it to do is to encourage articulacy in the young.

I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.

As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body.

Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has 12 syllables in a line, the challenge is, 'How can I interpret the meaning and contain it without going one syllable over?'

The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

We go through life owned by the stories we tell ourselves which are often historic and charged narratives - things we've learnt since childhood that we don't even consciously realise are going on.

For every moment of concentration there is an equal moment of relaxation.

A magic trick of any sort works because you tell yourself a story about what you see. And politicians use this all the time in their own way by throwing a load of statistics at you when things don't quite follow and then saying, 'So therefore blah,' and you believe that 'blah' thing because of the confusion that's come before.

In terms of self-esteem and confidence I think I'm generally quite healthy.

Sometimes you need to be aware of the bigger picture you are missing.

The people who are most susceptible to hypnosis - the rugger bugger types - were also the ones who intimidated me most at school, so on an unconscious level I suppose I'm turning the tables on them.

Feeling we have to be constantly updated about the lives of our friends and that everything we say has to be out there leads to frustration, anger and jealousy much more than it leads to anything else.

Hypnosis is just suggestibility; you see it in certain people.

I've got a house full of taxidermy. It's like a museum. I have about 200 pieces in total, all ethically sourced.

That's how I lived for 10 years in Bristol after graduating. I just stayed in my student flat and paid very little rent. It was lovely, and part of me still misses that very lazy lifestyle. I was known as the magician on the street, and I used to dress a little eccentrically in a cloak.

The big, fun, ambitious ideas tend to come out of the frustration of talking for too long about the smaller, weaselly ones.

Sexuality is often tied in with something you feel you lack in yourself and look for in others.

Most people's fear of being in front of an audience can generally be conquered by being completely on top of what it is they've got to do.

Magic, whether it's mind magic or conjuring, is about the cheapest and quickest way of impressing people, and I think if you don't grow out of that as a magician then it shows, and people get a bit sick of that after a while, because it starts to feel like posturing. So I grew out of it.

I have a couple of dogs and I live with my partner. We just like to sit and read and I'm generally quite quiet.

Kindness and compassion aren't political qualities even though they get politicized.

I'm finally having my TV removed and replaced by a tropical fish tank, which I hope will provide more interesting viewing.

A lot of unconfident kids do tricks because it's the quickest route to impressing people. You can stand behind something amazing and people think you're amazing.

I never quite know how to describe what I do. I normally just say, 'Oh, I'm a magician', which probably puts fairly naff ideas in people's minds but is pleasantly conversation-stopping.

There's something a bit embarrassing about saying you're a magician. It immediately suggests all these horrendous cliches, let alone that you're a grown-up doing a child's job.

I had a natural aptitude for wanting to be the centre of attention and a definite skill for annoying people.

It's a controlling thing on stage - you're directing the action, getting people to play their role. In real life, I take being kind and nice seriously, so the last thing I'd ever want to be is that weird, controlling, manipulative character.

Magic has both feet planted in cheap vaudeville and childish posturing; in dishonesty and therefore not in art.

Suggestibility is a very loose term. You may not be the sort of person who responds well to a hypnotist on stage, but you might find, for example, that a doctor administering a placebo to you is something you respond well to.

Taking up magic was a distraction from my sexuality. There is that 1970s cliche of the gay man as hairdresser, interior decorator, fashionista... and all of those things are about arranging surfaces in a very dazzling way - and magic is all about how you arrange surfaces. I got very good at deflecting people from things I didn't want them to see.

I don't like big spiders in the house.

Yes, I've had a slight feeling of wanting to reclaim some of the lifestyle I had in my 20s, which means poncing around in what amounts to pirate clothes.

So I don't really suffer too badly from fears - I'm quite happy to engender them in other people though!

In real life, when I can avoid anything stressful, I do.

Being gay facilitated my capacity for shame. As a child, I carried around this thing that gradually became this big dark secret. When I came out in a newspaper interview at 30 I was expecting the reaction the following day to be like the climax of 'Dead Poets Society,' but actually no one really cared.

That was how I started, as a hypnotist. But I didn't like the kind of gigs I was being offered. I didn't want to embarrass people.