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" 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
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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
" Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. "
Derek Walcott
Love
Stronger
Symmetry
" The myth of Naipaul... has long been a farce. "
Derek Walcott
Long
Been
Farce
" I didn't pass the scholarship exam for Oxford because of poor mathematics. "
Derek Walcott
Poor
Scholarship
Mathematics
" 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
" 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
" I think young writers ought to be heretical. "
Derek Walcott
Writers
Young
Ought
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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'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
" 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
" 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
" Anybody great, we're all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it. "
Derek Walcott
Interested
See
Great
" Ted Hughes is dead. That's a fact, OK. Then there's something called the poetry of Ted Hughes. The poetry of Ted Hughes is more real, very soon, than the myth that Ted Hughes existed - because that can't be proven. "
Derek Walcott
Dead
More
Real
" 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
" When you're young, influences count. "
Derek Walcott
Young
You
Count
" My relationship to Britain is of no consequence. "
Derek Walcott
Relationship
Consequence
Britain
" The painter I really thought I could learn from was Cezanne - some sort of resemblance to oranges and greens and browns of the dry season in St. Lucia. "
Derek Walcott
Learn
Dry
Thought
" 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
" There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise. "
Derek Walcott
Culture
Good
Morning
" I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry. "
Derek Walcott
Always
Write
Wanted
" I knew very early what I wanted to do, and I considered myself lucky to know that's what I wanted, even in a place like Saint Lucia where there was no publishing house and no theatre. "
Derek Walcott
Know
Early
Theatre
" 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
" 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. "
Derek Walcott
Citizenship
Heritage
College
" I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem - is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can't act a myth. "
Derek Walcott
Reality
Believe
Problem
" 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
" 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
Art
Painting
Know
" I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures. It is not inhibited by flourish. It is a rhetorical society. It is a society of physical performance. It is a society of style. "
Derek Walcott
Style
Performance
Come