Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I'd gone to England. I might have developed a cynicism about my origins, a belittling of them, or an excessive nostalgia for them. "

Related Quotes:

" A long time ago, I thought, as a writer in the Caribbean, 'I don't ever want to have to write 'It was great in Paris.'' Because I don't think, proportionately speaking, that one's experience in a city as opposed to, say, a village in St. Lucia, is superior to the other. "

Derek Walcott

Think

Time

City

" 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 think young writers ought to be heretical. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world. "

" When you're young, influences count. "

" I was writing from a very, very early age. My father used to write. He died early, and my mother was a schoolteacher, so my academic background from childhood is a strong one, a good one. "

" Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral. "

" I think, at the heart of the idea of American democracy, there is something tender. "

" 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. "

" My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act. "

" 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

" 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. "

" The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it. "

" Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has 12 syllables in a line, the challenge is, 'How can I interpret the meaning and contain it without going one syllable over?' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" The Chinese, the African, and the European - they are all there. So the division of the Caribbean experience into being emphatically only African is absurd. "

" 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. "