Derek Walcott Quotes

Most Famous Derek Walcott Quotes of All Time!

We have created a collection of some of the best derek-walcott quotes so you can read and share anytime with your friends and family. Share our Top 10 Derek Walcott Quotes on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

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:...

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.

Popular Quotes Topics for You.

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...

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...

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

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.

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

I feel blessed that I was gifted.

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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was '25 Poems.' It cost 200 dollars.

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...

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

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...

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

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.

Guys, we are trying to share Unique Derek Walcott Quotes, so you will not get to read the same things again and again on our website. You can also share your favorites on Facebook or send them to a friend who loves to reading quotes.