- Edward
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- Nov 07, 2020
Derek Walcott Quotes
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Effort
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.
- Education
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Childhood
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Feel
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- Nov 07, 2020
I feel blessed that I was gifted.
- Character
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- Nov 07, 2020
You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.
- Heritage
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Feel
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.'
- Place
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Place
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- Nov 07, 2020
I grew up in a place in which, if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it.
- Cost
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- Nov 07, 2020
My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was '25 Poems.' It cost 200 dollars.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race.
- Learning
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.'
- Possible
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- Nov 07, 2020
Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.
- Experience
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
I have to live, socially, in an almost unfinished society. Among the almost great, among the almost true, among the almost honest. That allows me to describe the anguish.
- Feelings
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Influences
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- Nov 07, 2020
When you're young, influences count.
- Fairness
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm read in the Caribbean with justice, with fairness. What I expect it to do is to encourage articulacy in the young.
- Paradise
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.
- Body
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- Nov 07, 2020
As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body.
- Body
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- Nov 07, 2020
My body's urge is to be in a pair of shorts, working and going down to the beach.
- Challenge
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- Nov 07, 2020
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?'
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole.
- Important
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- Nov 07, 2020
The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.
- Person
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Nov 07, 2020
Anybody great, we're all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it.
- Caribbean
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- Nov 07, 2020
I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer.
- Never
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- Nov 07, 2020
I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.
- Poetry
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- Nov 07, 2020
Where I come from, we sing poetry.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Happen
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Matter
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Nov 07, 2020
I don't want to write poems about the royal wedding. I would have to be moved by the event.
- Consequence
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- Nov 07, 2020
My relationship to Britain is of no consequence.
- Part
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- Nov 07, 2020
I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
- Farce
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- Nov 07, 2020
The myth of Naipaul... has long been a farce.
- Greatest
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- Nov 07, 2020
The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness.
- England
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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 Am
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Long
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Patience
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Identity
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- Nov 07, 2020
There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame.
- Opinion
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- Nov 07, 2020
In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.
- Ocean
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Complicated
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- Nov 07, 2020
Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
I write plays and poetry at the same time, and I'm always refining, but I'm not obsessive about it. It's what I like to do, what I've always wanted to do.
- Poetry
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Next
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- Nov 07, 2020
Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
- Great Part
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Mother
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
I don't know what would have happened to me as a writer if I had gone to England and shaped my life out of England. Of course, I will never know, but I think I prefer what did happen.
- Encouragement
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Language
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- Nov 07, 2020
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
- Human
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- God
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
- Culture
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- Nov 07, 2020
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
- Nov 07, 2020
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
- Ought
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think young writers ought to be heretical.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Painter
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Poetry
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- Nov 07, 2020
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
- Job
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Duty
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- Nov 07, 2020
My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty.
- How
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- Nov 07, 2020
How does a poet teach himself or herself? I think chiefly by imitation, chiefly by practising it as a deliberate technical exercise often. Translation, imitation, those were my methods anyway.
- Black
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- Nov 07, 2020
I am not defined as a black writer in the Caribbean, but as soon as I go to America or the U.K., my place becomes black theatre. It's a little ridiculous.
- Go
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- Nov 07, 2020
I made a vow that I wouldn't be tempted by what could happen to me if I went to Europe. I thought, 'You could be absorbed in it - it's so seductive, you might lose your own search for identity.' Then, when I did finally go to Europe, I was able to resist it because I had established my own identity.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Food
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Language
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- Nov 07, 2020
The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I virtually had it all to myself, including the language that was spoken there, which was a French Creole, and a landscape that is not recorded, really, and the people.
- Family
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Nov 07, 2020
There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical.
- Nov 07, 2020
Minor writers think style is all.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.'
- Grateful
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- Nov 07, 2020
I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020