For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
I'd rather have just one person who reads and feels my work deeply than hundreds of thousands who read it but don't… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets' Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate,… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
You can't read to yourself. It's your inner ear that hears a poem. If you hear a poet read his own work,… — 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
