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.
Derek WalcottRead
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.
Interpretation
The value of deep appreciation is greater than popularity without connection.
Derek Walcott emphasizes the importance of meaningful engagement over superficial popularity. He expresses a preference for having a smaller audience that truly resonates with his work, rather than a large number of indifferent readers. This sentiment highlights the significance of authentic connection in art and expression, suggesting that true fulfillment comes from the depth of understanding in relationships with one's audience.
In practice
During a literary event, an author might use this quote to express their views on the importance of integrity in writing.
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.
I have to be composed; I have to be poised. I have to remember what my first piano teacher told me: 'You do not touch that piano until you are ready and until they are ready to listen to you.
My touchstone started out being - and is still - exploring the ways by which to make clothing from a single piece of cloth.
People with a lot of money don't dress as well as people who have to make do, who have to be inventive. Those are the people who are always more interestingly dressed, I think. Everything I do, I do with gut instinct. If I think too much, it won't come out right.
I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like."
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
The world is a king, and like a king, desires flattery in return for favor; but true art is selfish and perverse β it will not submit to the mold of flattery.
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