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" There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise. "

Derek Walcott

Culture

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" I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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?' "

" 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.' "

" A culture, we all know, is made by its cities. "

" I think young writers ought to be heretical. "

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

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet. "

" Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "