Derek Walcott Quotes
-
I write plays and poetry at the same time, and I'm always refining, but I'm not obsessive about it. It's what I like to do, what I've always wanted to do.
-
Minor writers think style is all.
-
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 primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer.
-
I don't know what would have happened to me as a writer if I had gone to England and shaped my life out of England. Of course, I will never know, but I think I prefer what did happen.
-
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.
-
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 am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift.
-
I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.
-
I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don't affect your work.
-
As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body.
-
Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.
-
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.
-
Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
-
I am not defined as a black writer in the Caribbean, but as soon as I go to America or the U.K., my place becomes black theatre. It's a little ridiculous.
-
I can't tear up a poem and be a sound bite for you. Why is that so hard for anyone to understand?
-
I try to forget what happiness was,and when that don't work, I study the stars.
-
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.
-
The headmaster asked to read one of my poems at some celebration or other when I was about 10. When I look back, that is phenomenal encouragement.
-
Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral.
-
My mother hid the struggle from us children. She complained about her salary, and she had a tough time. Although she became a headmistress, she still had to do a lot of sewing. The more I think about her, the more remarkable I realise she was. And she understood straight away when I said that I wanted to write.
-
How does a poet teach himself or herself? I think chiefly by imitation, chiefly by practising it as a deliberate technical exercise often. Translation, imitation, those were my methods anyway.
-
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.
-
That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.