Derek Walcott Quotes
-
I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.
-
I don't think there is any such thing as a black writer or a white writer. Ultimately, there is someone whom one reads.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?'
-
Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
-
There's always a need at a critical time for poetry.
-
The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed?
-
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
-
There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical.
-
Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
-
I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I try to forget what happiness was,and when that don't work, I study the stars.
-
The painter I really thought I could learn from was Cezanne - some sort of resemblance to oranges and greens and browns of the dry season in St. Lucia.
-
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.
-
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.