Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
I don't think there is any such thing as a black writer or a white writer. Ultimately, there is someone whom one… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
I was writing from a very, very early age. My father used to write. He died early, and my mother was a… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
What I described in 'Another Life' - about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened - is… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
After a while, when the writer is mature, it doesn't really matter - not because of finances but because of reputation. It… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
The thing a writer has to avoid is being the 'voice' of his people and pretending he can speak for them. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
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… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
“As human beings we’ve certainly suffered the loss of awe, the loss of sacredness, and the loss of the fact that we’re not here—… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
“I shall unlearn feeling, unlearn my gift. That is greater and harder than what passes there for life.” — Derek Walcott Copy Share
The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness. — Derek Walcott Copy Share
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
My mother, who is nearly ninety now, still talks continually about my father. All my life, I've been aware of her grief about his… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
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… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has 12 syllables… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings. — Derek Walcott Copy Share
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 Copy Share
