Derek Walcott

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.

Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.

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.

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.

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.

The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.

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 number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

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.

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.

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.

I'm read in the Caribbean with justice, with fairness. What I expect it to do is to encourage articulacy in the young.

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

She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.

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.

Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

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.

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.'

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.

Sometimes what we call tragedy, at least in the theater, are really case histories. They're based on the central figure, and things happen to that person, and they're called tragedy because they're extremely sad. But tragedy always has a glorious thing happen at the end of it. That's what the catharsis is.

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