Derek Walcott Quotes
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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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I think, at the heart of the idea of American democracy, there is something tender.
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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'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 don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big.
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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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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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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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The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.
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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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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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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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I think young writers ought to be heretical.
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My relationship to Britain is of no consequence.
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If music goes out of language, then you are in bad trouble.
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If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.
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This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.
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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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You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.
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The myth of Naipaul... has long been a farce.
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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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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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We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.
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Sometimes what we call tragedy, at least in the theater, are really case histories. They're based on the central figure, and things happen to that person, and they're called tragedy because they're extremely sad. But tragedy always has a glorious thing happen at the end of it. That's what the catharsis is.