Derek Walcott Quotes
This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.
Derek Walcott
Quotes to Explore
There are certain functions that a writer has to do. In a time of crisis, it is great to have heroic poems, as it was in the Irish Revolution. It's great to have great songs, because people need something to sing when they are marching. That's OK, but it should be on the side. It's not the ultimate thing.
Derek Walcott
Anybody great, we're all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it.
Derek Walcott
I don't believe that poetry is in danger because nobody wants to read it or appreciate it. There is a tremendous audience for it on any given day or night. You just have to know where to look.
Derek Walcott
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.
Derek Walcott
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.
Derek Walcott
After a while, when the writer is mature, it doesn't really matter - not because of finances but because of reputation. It doesn't really matter how many awards you get.
Derek Walcott
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
Derek Walcott
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.
Derek Walcott
I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad.
Derek Walcott
Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting.
Derek Walcott
Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.
Derek Walcott
I didn't pass the scholarship exam for Oxford because of poor mathematics.
Derek Walcott