Calabash portrays Jamaica as a highly educated and sophisticated literary society, that we have talent and that we cannot only sing music but we can also write books.

The festival also shows that our novelists can be on par with other authors in the world. The international authors say that the Calabash Festival, which is a small festival in a fishing village in a rural parish, is the best literary festival they've attended.

The festival has a very positive image on the global front as we have extensive and always positive international press like the New York Times, Independent in London, Fox National News, Book Television in Canada and The Global Mail in Canada, among others.

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than to submit to the desolation of an empty abundance. It is a strange part of the other America that one finds in the intellectual slums.