Derek Walcott Quotes
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I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
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Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
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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 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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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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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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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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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 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 consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body.
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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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I have no curiosity. I'm an island boy.
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My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act.
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When you're young, influences count.
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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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My body's urge is to be in a pair of shorts, working and going down to the beach.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.