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" 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. "

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" Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting. "

Derek Walcott

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Painting

Know

" I think young writers ought to be heretical. "

" In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't. "

Derek Walcott

You

Opinion

" If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history. "

" I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad. "

Derek Walcott

I Am

Been

" There's always a need at a critical time for poetry. "

" I have no curiosity. I'm an island boy. "

" 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. "

" I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I'd gone to England. I might have developed a cynicism about my origins, a belittling of them, or an excessive nostalgia for them. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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.' "

" 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. "

" I don't think there is any such thing as a black writer or a white writer. Ultimately, there is someone whom one reads. "

" The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings. "

" The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed? "

" The headmaster asked to read one of my poems at some celebration or other when I was about 10. When I look back, that is phenomenal encouragement. "

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

" I write plays and poetry at the same time, and I'm always refining, but I'm not obsessive about it. It's what I like to do, what I've always wanted to do. "

" I have to live, socially, in an almost unfinished society. Among the almost great, among the almost true, among the almost honest. That allows me to describe the anguish. "

Derek Walcott

Honest

Society

" The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things. "

" I can't tear up a poem and be a sound bite for you. Why is that so hard for anyone to understand? "

" My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race. "

" I don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big. "

" Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral. "

" 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. "

" The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. "

" I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet. "

" How does a poet teach himself or herself? I think chiefly by imitation, chiefly by practising it as a deliberate technical exercise often. Translation, imitation, those were my methods anyway. "