Derek Walcott Quotes

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.

Derek Walcott

• Education
• English

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• Anybody great, we're all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it.

  

  Derek Walcott
  • Great

• 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
  • People
  • Time
  • Great

• 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
  • May
  • Food

• 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
  • Believe
  • Night
  • Poetry

• 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
  • Family
  • She
  • Mother

• A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

  

  Derek Walcott
  • Culture

• 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

• 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
  • Music
  • Art
  • May

• 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
  • Great
  • Live
  • True

• Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.

  

  Derek Walcott
  • World
  • City
  • Heaven

• Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole.

  

  Derek Walcott
  • Die

• I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad.

  

  Derek Walcott

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

  

  Derek Walcott

• Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.

  

  Derek Walcott
  • Good
  • Art
  • Soul

• I don't want to write poems about the royal wedding. I would have to be moved by the event.

  

  Derek Walcott
  • Wedding

• The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.

  

  Derek Walcott
  • World
  • History

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

  

  Derek Walcott
  • Heart

• My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a writer; both me and my brother wrote.

  

  Derek Walcott
  • She
  • Mother
  • Brother

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

  

  Derek Walcott
  • Justice

• What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it's better than anybody else's because it's yours. It's extremely provincial and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be, 'Don't read Shakespeare because he was white.'

  

  Derek Walcott
  • People
  • Learning

• 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.

  

  Derek Walcott
  • Life
  • Mother
  • Father

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

  

  Derek Walcott
  • World
  • Fall
  • Poetry

• I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.

  

  Derek Walcott
  • Trying
  • English

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

  

  Derek Walcott
  • World
  • Identity