Derek Walcott Quotes
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Where I come from, we sing poetry.
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There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise.
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Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
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The Chinese, the African, and the European - they are all there. So the division of the Caribbean experience into being emphatically only African is absurd.
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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.
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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?'
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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.
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Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.
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I don't think there is any such thing as a black writer or a white writer. Ultimately, there is someone whom one reads.
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There's always a need at a critical time for poetry.
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I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.
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Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
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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.
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I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,I had a sound colonial education,I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.
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I try to forget what happiness was,and when that don't work, I study the stars.
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Miscegenation is not an idea that we would have in the Caribbean. It wouldn't come up because anybody could marry anybody, you know. I'm not saying that there aren't prejudices in the Caribbean, but the idea of the word 'miscegenation' is not something that we think of.
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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.
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There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets' Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English poetry. The most compelling aspect of his work was his intimacy with nature.
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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.
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The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed?
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Poets are always making waves. I mean, you know, in an ideal situation, the ideal republic can't tolerate poets because - it isn't that they mutter and criticize; it is that the poet does not accept the situation called the 'perfect' condition of man - in other words, perfect in the materialistic sense.
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If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
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I knew very early what I wanted to do, and I considered myself lucky to know that's what I wanted, even in a place like Saint Lucia where there was no publishing house and no theatre.
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Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in a sense, without doing it, they are crossing themselves; I mean, it's like the habit of Catholics going into water: you cross yourself before you go in.