Derek Walcott

“I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.”

“Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.”

“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.”

“The older I get, the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts.”

“I don't know what would have happened to me as a writer if I had gone to England and shaped my life out of England. Of course, I will never know, but I think I prefer what did happen.”

“I don't want to write poems about the royal wedding. I would have to be moved by the event.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My mother, who is nearly ninety now, still talks continually about my father. All my life, I've been aware of her grief about his absence and her strong pride in his conduct.”

“I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don't affect your work.”

“What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it's better than anybody else's because it's yours. It's extremely provincial and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be, 'Don't read Shakespeare because he was white.'”

“For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I have tried to give that world an exposure so the world can better understand it.”

“Minor writers think style is all.”

“Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.”

“I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem - is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can't act a myth.”

“Rhyme is an attempt to reassemble and reaffirm the possibility of paradise. There is a wholeness, a serenity, in sounds coupling to form a memory.”

“If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.”

“Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.”

“My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act.”

“As human beings we’ve certainly suffered the loss of awe, the loss of sacredness, and the loss of the fact that we’re not here— we’re not put on earth— to shape it anyway we want... You want something to happen with poetry, but it doesn’t make anything happen. So then somebody says, “What’s the use of poetry?” Then you say, “Well, what’s the use of a cloud? What’s the use of a river? What’s the use of a tree?” They don’t make anything happen.”