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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

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

" If music goes out of language, then you are in bad trouble. "

" I feel blessed that I was gifted. "

" The thing a writer has to avoid is being the 'voice' of his people and pretending he can speak for them. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When you're young, influences count. "

" That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people. "

" The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness. "

" I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Minor writers think style is all. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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" I think young writers ought to be heretical. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet. "