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
When I come to England, I don't claim England; I don't own it. I feel a great kinship because of the literature… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
I am not defined as a black writer in the Caribbean, but as soon as I go to America or the U.K.,… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
I am not in England; I live in the Caribbean. So I am not hungover by prizes and awards because it does… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
The older I get, the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say,… — 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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“I shall unlearn feeling, unlearn my gift. That is greater and harder than what passes there for life.” — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image