Derek Walcott

“I have no curiosity. I'm an island boy.”

“That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.”

“My delight in things is definitely Caribbean. It has to do with landscape and food. The fact that my language may have a metrical direction is because that's the shape of the language. I didn't make that shape.”

“As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body.”