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" I have no curiosity. I'm an island boy. "
Derek Walcott
Island
Curiosity
Boy
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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. "
Derek Walcott
Language
Hate
Great
" 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
" The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness. "
Derek Walcott
Heart
Greatest
Been
" 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
" The myth of Naipaul... has long been a farce. "
Derek Walcott
Long
Been
Farce
" 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
" My mother hid the struggle from us children. She complained about her salary, and she had a tough time. Although she became a headmistress, she still had to do a lot of sewing. The more I think about her, the more remarkable I realise she was. And she understood straight away when I said that I wanted to write. "
Derek Walcott
Think
Struggle
Mother
" 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
" There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical. "
Derek Walcott
Sound
People
Some
" 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
" Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic. "
Derek Walcott
Something
Any
Serious
" I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don't affect your work. "
Derek Walcott
Upset
I Can
Appreciate
" Where I come from, we sing poetry. "
Derek Walcott
Poetry
Where
Sing
" 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
" 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
" My body's urge is to be in a pair of shorts, working and going down to the beach. "
Derek Walcott
Pair
Body
Beach
" I am not defined as a black writer in the Caribbean, but as soon as I go to America or the U.K., my place becomes black theatre. It's a little ridiculous. "
Derek Walcott
Place
Theatre
Go
" I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet. "
Derek Walcott
Feel
Respect
Poetry
" 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
" 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
" This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo. "
Derek Walcott
Athens
Spain
Me
" 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
" What I described in 'Another Life' - about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened - is a frequent experience in a younger writer. "
Derek Walcott
Experience
Life
Writer
" 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
" 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
" Minor writers think style is all. "
Derek Walcott
Style
Minor
Think
" Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful. "
Derek Walcott
Performance
Possible
Wonderful
" 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
" What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it's better than anybody else's because it's yours. It's extremely provincial and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be, 'Don't read Shakespeare because he was white.' "
Derek Walcott
You
People
White
" If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average. "
Derek Walcott
Average
You
Writing