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" 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
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" 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 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
" The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things. "
Derek Walcott
Material Things
Satisfied
Lies
" Minor writers think style is all. "
Derek Walcott
Style
Minor
Think
" I made a vow that I wouldn't be tempted by what could happen to me if I went to Europe. I thought, 'You could be absorbed in it - it's so seductive, you might lose your own search for identity.' Then, when I did finally go to Europe, I was able to resist it because I had established my own identity. "
Derek Walcott
Identity
You
Thought
" 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
" 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
" I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. "
Derek Walcott
Up
Writing
Prayer
" 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
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Beautiful
People
Poetry
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Encouragement
Celebration
Back
" There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame. "
Derek Walcott
Identity
New
Blame
" A fisherman, say, working on a beach doing his job, may be photographed by a tourist because it's photogenic to see him working, and the Caribbean is extremely photogenic, so poverty is photogenic, and a lot of people are photographed in their poverty, and sometimes it's kind of exploited. "
Derek Walcott
Poverty
Say
Beach
" Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven. "
Derek Walcott
City
Because
New
" There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical. "
Derek Walcott
Sound
People
Some
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Landscape
Language
Direction
" I feel blessed that I was gifted. "
Derek Walcott
Gifted
Blessed
Feel
" As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body. "
Derek Walcott
Students
Body
Discipline
" A culture, we all know, is made by its cities. "
Derek Walcott
Know
Cities
Culture
" 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
" 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
" 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.' "
Derek Walcott
Look
You
Homecoming
" There's always a need at a critical time for poetry. "
Derek Walcott
Poetry
Time
Always
" What makes a poem is the discipline inherent in making a poem: trying to fit feelings in the requisite number of syllables and lines, disciplining one's feelings. "
Derek Walcott
Trying
Discipline
Feelings
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Think
Poet
Exercise
" 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
Like
" There's a ritualistic element to tragedy that everyone shares; there's something curiously glorious in terms of the most horrible kind of events that happen. "
Derek Walcott
Everyone
Tragedy
Kind
" 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
" 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 myth of Naipaul... has long been a farce. "
Derek Walcott
Long
Been
Farce