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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. "

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" 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. "

Derek Walcott

Beautiful

People

Poetry

" My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 feel blessed that I was gifted. "

" 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. "

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

" After a while, when the writer is mature, it doesn't really matter - not because of finances but because of reputation. It doesn't really matter how many awards you get. "

" 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

" The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed? "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" I think young writers ought to be heretical. "

" 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. "

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

" I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. "

Derek Walcott

Writing

Prayer

" 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. "

" Ted Hughes is dead. That's a fact, OK. Then there's something called the poetry of Ted Hughes. The poetry of Ted Hughes is more real, very soon, than the myth that Ted Hughes existed - because that can't be proven. "

Derek Walcott

Dead

Real

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

" I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer. "