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" I didn't pass the scholarship exam for Oxford because of poor mathematics. "
Derek Walcott
Poor
Scholarship
Mathematics
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" I don't think there is any such thing as a black writer or a white writer. Ultimately, there is someone whom one reads. "
Derek Walcott
Black
Someone
Think
" Minor writers think style is all. "
Derek Walcott
Style
Minor
Think
" I think young writers ought to be heretical. "
Derek Walcott
Writers
Young
Ought
" You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp. "
Derek Walcott
Active
You
People
" There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical. "
Derek Walcott
Sound
People
Some
" 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 don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big. "
Derek Walcott
Really
Poetry
Think
" The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. "
Derek Walcott
Language
Special
Imagination
" 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.' "
Derek Walcott
Imagination
Saying
Good
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Serenity
Memory
Paradise
" I have no curiosity. I'm an island boy. "
Derek Walcott
Island
Curiosity
Boy
" 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
" The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it. "
Derek Walcott
Respect
Awe
Caribbean
" There's always a need at a critical time for poetry. "
Derek Walcott
Poetry
Time
Always
" 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
" I don't want to write poems about the royal wedding. I would have to be moved by the event. "
Derek Walcott
Write
Event
Royal
" I grew up in a place in which, if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it. "
Derek Walcott
Scream
You
Poetry
" 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
" 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
" Miscegenation is not an idea that we would have in the Caribbean. It wouldn't come up because anybody could marry anybody, you know. I'm not saying that there aren't prejudices in the Caribbean, but the idea of the word 'miscegenation' is not something that we think of. "
Derek Walcott
Saying
Think
Up
" If music goes out of language, then you are in bad trouble. "
Derek Walcott
Trouble
Language
Music
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Think
Time
City
" My body's urge is to be in a pair of shorts, working and going down to the beach. "
Derek Walcott
Pair
Body
Beach
" Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves. "
Derek Walcott
Surprise
Beauty
History
" Where I come from, we sing poetry. "
Derek Walcott
Poetry
Where
Sing
" The thing a writer has to avoid is being the 'voice' of his people and pretending he can speak for them. "
Derek Walcott
Voice
Avoid
People
" I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift. "
Derek Walcott
Know
You
Feel
" My relationship to Britain is of no consequence. "
Derek Walcott
Relationship
Consequence
Britain
" 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
" My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race. "
Derek Walcott
Generation
Race
Over