Derek Walcott Quotes
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I was writing from a very, very early age. My father used to write. He died early, and my mother was a schoolteacher, so my academic background from childhood is a strong one, a good one.
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A long time ago, I thought, as a writer in the Caribbean, 'I don't ever want to have to write 'It was great in Paris.'' Because I don't think, proportionately speaking, that one's experience in a city as opposed to, say, a village in St. Lucia, is superior to the other.
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If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.
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I have no curiosity. I'm an island boy.
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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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Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
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I feel blessed that I was gifted.
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My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act.
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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.
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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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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 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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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.
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When a child's mind develops and is heading in a certain direction, we murder that mentality, we murder that imagination, by saying, 'Now, that is all well and good, but now sit down and start to study.'
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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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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'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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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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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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In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.
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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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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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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 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.