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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.
Derek Walcott -
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
Derek Walcott
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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.
Derek Walcott -
I have no curiosity. I'm an island boy.
Derek Walcott -
I go back to St. Lucia, and the exhilaration I feel is not simply the exhilaration of homecoming and of nostalgia. It is almost an irritation of feeling: 'Well, you never got it right. Now you have another chance. Maybe you can try and look harder.'
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott
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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.
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott -
If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott
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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.
Derek Walcott -
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
Derek Walcott -
When you're young, influences count.
Derek Walcott -
My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race.
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott -
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.
Derek Walcott
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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.
Derek Walcott -
My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act.
Derek Walcott -
A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is.
Derek Walcott -
There's a ritualistic element to tragedy that everyone shares; there's something curiously glorious in terms of the most horrible kind of events that happen.
Derek Walcott