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" I hate all that nonsense about not touching the colonialists' language. All that about it being corrupting and belonging to the master and making you Caliban. That thinking just denies you an outlet. You deny everything that is great from a language, whether it is Conrad or Shakespeare. "

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" There are certain functions that a writer has to do. In a time of crisis, it is great to have heroic poems, as it was in the Irish Revolution. It's great to have great songs, because people need something to sing when they are marching. That's OK, but it should be on the side. It's not the ultimate thing. "

Derek Walcott

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Need

" As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body. "

" 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. "

" When you're young, influences count. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty. "

" 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. "

" The myth of Naipaul... has long been a farce. "

" I feel blessed that I was gifted. "

" 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. "

" My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was '25 Poems.' It cost 200 dollars. "

" My body's urge is to be in a pair of shorts, working and going down to the beach. "

" I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift. "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" When I come to England, I don't claim England; I don't own it. I feel a great kinship because of the literature and the landscape. I have great affection for Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin, but there's still this distance: looking on at what I'm admiring, separate from what I am. And that's OK. "

" My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been thirty-one. Then there was my twin brother and my sister. We had two aunts as well, my father's sisters. But the immediate family consisted of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me. "

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

" A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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