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
A fisherman, say, working on a beach doing his job, may be photographed by a tourist because it's photogenic to see him… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it's better than anybody else's… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it. — 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
