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" I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body. "
Derek Walcott
Sea
Body
Consider
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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. "
Derek Walcott
Just One
Just
Care
" What was moving, I think, was the fact that the statue is a woman and not a heroic, manly figure. So for all her scale and immensity, there's something soft about the Statue of Liberty, something tender about her. "
Derek Walcott
Liberty
Woman
Her
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Ruins
Over
Sugar
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Things Happen
Tragedy
Sad
" There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame. "
Derek Walcott
Identity
New
Blame
" I don't believe that poetry is in danger because nobody wants to read it or appreciate it. There is a tremendous audience for it on any given day or night. You just have to know where to look. "
Derek Walcott
Look
Poetry
Night
" My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a writer; both me and my brother wrote. "
Derek Walcott
Mother
Me
Brother
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Father
Mother
Good
" I'm read in the Caribbean with justice, with fairness. What I expect it to do is to encourage articulacy in the young. "
Derek Walcott
Fairness
Young
Read
" Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in a sense, without doing it, they are crossing themselves; I mean, it's like the habit of Catholics going into water: you cross yourself before you go in. "
Derek Walcott
Stand
You
Water
" 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
Go
" I'm from the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean in the Lesser Antilles, the lower part of the archipelago, which is a bilingual island - French, Creole, and English - but my education is in English. "
Derek Walcott
Island
Education
Caribbean
" Poets are always making waves. I mean, you know, in an ideal situation, the ideal republic can't tolerate poets because - it isn't that they mutter and criticize; it is that the poet does not accept the situation called the 'perfect' condition of man - in other words, perfect in the materialistic sense. "
Derek Walcott
You
Perfect
Know
" 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
Me
Society
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Sea
Strength
Trees
" I think young writers ought to be heretical. "
Derek Walcott
Writers
Young
Ought
" My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act. "
Derek Walcott
Taught
Used
Shakespeare
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Work
Yourself
Poem
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Write
Same
Always
" Minor writers think style is all. "
Derek Walcott
Style
Minor
Think
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
West
Culture
Better
" After a while, when the writer is mature, it doesn't really matter - not because of finances but because of reputation. It doesn't really matter how many awards you get. "
Derek Walcott
You
Reputation
Mature
" I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad. "
Derek Walcott
I Am
Am
Been
" Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole. "
Derek Walcott
Die
Soil
Return
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Caribbean
Awards
Happen
" The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I virtually had it all to myself, including the language that was spoken there, which was a French Creole, and a landscape that is not recorded, really, and the people. "
Derek Walcott
Myself
Language
Been
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Life
My Life
Know
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Arts
Development
I Am
" Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next. "
Derek Walcott
Not Knowing
Ignorance
Process
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Remembering
Memory
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