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" 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. "

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" 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 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Minor writers think style is all. "

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

" The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it. "

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

" I'm read in the Caribbean with justice, with fairness. What I expect it to do is to encourage articulacy in the young. "

" 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

" My relationship to Britain is of no consequence. "

" 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

" 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. "

" Sometimes what we call tragedy, at least in the theater, are really case histories. They're based on the central figure, and things happen to that person, and they're called tragedy because they're extremely sad. But tragedy always has a glorious thing happen at the end of it. That's what the catharsis is. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven. "

" I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry. "

" If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history. "

" My mother, who is nearly ninety now, still talks continually about my father. All my life, I've been aware of her grief about his absence and her strong pride in his conduct. "

" I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad. "

Derek Walcott

I Am

Been

" All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase. "

" The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings. "

" 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. "

" My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race. "