Derek Walcott Quotes
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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.
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My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race.
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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.
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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.
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I think young writers ought to be heretical.
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The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.
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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.
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No masterpieces in huge frames to worship, … and yet there are the days when every street corner rounds itself into a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase, canoes drawn up by the market, the harbour’s blue, the barracks. So much to do still, all of it praise.
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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.
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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.
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My relationship to Britain is of no consequence.
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When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.
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There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical.
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We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.
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The myth of Naipaul... has long been a farce.
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I don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big.
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The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
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I think, at the heart of the idea of American democracy, there is something tender.
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If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.
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The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
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The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.
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What was moving, I think, was the fact that the statue is a woman and not a heroic, manly figure. So for all her scale and immensity, there's something soft about the Statue of Liberty, something tender about her.
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I have no curiosity. I'm an island boy.
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Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.