Derek Walcott Quotes
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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.
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I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body.
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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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Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
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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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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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When I come to England, I don't claim England; I don't own it. I feel a great kinship because of the literature and the landscape. I have great affection for Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin, but there's still this distance: looking on at what I'm admiring, separate from what I am. And that's OK.
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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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You can't read to yourself. It's your inner ear that hears a poem. If you hear a poet read his own work, it becomes very exciting. The melody is a great part of it.
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The Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives. They draw their working strength from it organically, like trees, like the sea almond or the spice laurel of the heights.
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The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
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My body's urge is to be in a pair of shorts, working and going down to the beach.
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I'd rather have just one person who reads and feels my work deeply than hundreds of thousands who read it but don't really care about.
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I am not in England; I live in the Caribbean. So I am not hungover by prizes and awards because it does not happen very often.
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My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act.
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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 feel blessed that I was gifted.
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All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.
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The thing a writer has to avoid is being the 'voice' of his people and pretending he can speak for them.
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If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.
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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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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 Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it.