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" 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. "

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" 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

" Minor writers think style is all. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I didn't pass the scholarship exam for Oxford because of poor mathematics. "

" 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. "

" There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical. "

" If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average. "

" 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. "

" My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a writer; both me and my brother wrote. "

Derek Walcott

Mother

Brother

" 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. "

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

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

" 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 taught Shakespeare and used to act. "

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

" Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves. "

" 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. "

" I have no curiosity. I'm an island boy. "

" 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. "

" I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem - is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can't act a myth. "

" 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. "

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

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

" For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I have tried to give that world an exposure so the world can better understand it. "

" A fisherman, say, working on a beach doing his job, may be photographed by a tourist because it's photogenic to see him working, and the Caribbean is extremely photogenic, so poverty is photogenic, and a lot of people are photographed in their poverty, and sometimes it's kind of exploited. "

" 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. "

" There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame. "

" Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god. "

Derek Walcott

Remembering

Memory

" 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. "