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.
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.
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.
There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical.
Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in a sense, without doing it, they are crossing themselves; I mean, it's like the habit of Catholics going into water: you cross yourself before you go in.
Minor writers think style is all.
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.'
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.
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.
I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad.
For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.Collection: Morning
The future happens. No matter how much we scream.Collection: Matter
Love After Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.Collection: Heart
Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe. I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.Collection: Art
The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome.Collection: Inspiring
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.Collection: Summer
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.Collection: Style
I read; I travel; I becomeCollection: Travel
Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.Collection: Passion
Time is the metre, memory the only plot.Collection: Time
To change your language you must change your life.Collection: Life
The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.Collection: Black History
What are men? Children who doubt.Collection: Children
I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?Collection: Real
The mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there.Collection: Mirrors
Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.Collection: Heart
The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.Collection: Firsts
The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.Collection: Truth Is
All of Victorian verse is pentameter.Collection: Victorian
We look and see what we see in a mirror, and we believe it. That's important, the question of belief. The question is: Should we believe what we see in a mirror?Collection: Believe
How can I turn from Africa and live?Collection: Turns
The thing that is believed is a reality.Collection: Reality
The English language is nobody's special property.Collection: Special
Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire poesia "Metamorfosi, I. LunaCollection: Fire
I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars.Collection: Stars
The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .Collection: Shadow
The poem is itself a mirror.Collection: Mirrors
Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.Collection: Wind
In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.Collection: Sleep
The classics can console. But not enough.Collection: Enough
Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.Collection: Art
I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.Collection: Sunset
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.Collection: Voice
Americans are not brought up with meter. They're not brought up with poetry. If you try to get them to recite, they're too embarrassed.Collection: Trying
Who cares about a kid from the Midwest writing pentameter? It's stupid.Collection: Stupid
You can't write drunk.Collection: Writing
She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.Collection: Cat
I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.Collection: Horse
I read; I travel; I become.Collection: Travel