Derek Walcott Quotes
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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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Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
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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 number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.
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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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I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body.
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I have no curiosity. I'm an island boy.
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Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
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I feel blessed that I was gifted.
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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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When you're young, influences count.
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The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was '25 Poems.' It cost 200 dollars.
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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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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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Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.