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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?'
Derek Walcott -
I hate all that nonsense about not touching the colonialists' language. All that about it being corrupting and belonging to the master and making you Caliban. That thinking just denies you an outlet. You deny everything that is great from a language, whether it is Conrad or Shakespeare.
Derek Walcott
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There's always a need at a critical time for poetry.
Derek Walcott -
My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty.
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott -
I made a vow that I wouldn't be tempted by what could happen to me if I went to Europe. I thought, 'You could be absorbed in it - it's so seductive, you might lose your own search for identity.' Then, when I did finally go to Europe, I was able to resist it because I had established my own identity.
Derek Walcott -
I think young writers ought to be heretical.
Derek Walcott -
Rhyme is an attempt to reassemble and reaffirm the possibility of paradise. There is a wholeness, a serenity, in sounds coupling to form a memory.
Derek Walcott
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The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.
Derek Walcott -
As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body.
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott -
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 -
I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.
Derek Walcott
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I think, at the heart of the idea of American democracy, there is something tender.
Derek Walcott -
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott -
I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem - is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can't act a myth.
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott -
I try to forget what happiness was,and when that don't work, I study the stars.
Derek Walcott
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Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
Derek Walcott -
The myth of Naipaul... has long been a farce.
Derek Walcott -
A fisherman, say, working on a beach doing his job, may be photographed by a tourist because it's photogenic to see him working, and the Caribbean is extremely photogenic, so poverty is photogenic, and a lot of people are photographed in their poverty, and sometimes it's kind of exploited.
Derek Walcott -
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
Derek Walcott