Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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.

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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.

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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
Derek Walcott

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
Derek Walcott

The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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.

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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.

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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.

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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.

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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.

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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.

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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.

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott

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.