Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness. — 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
… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element… — 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
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 have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. — 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
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously… — 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
There are certain functions that a writer has to do. In a time of crisis, it is great to have heroic poems,… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
A long time ago, I thought, as a writer in the Caribbean, 'I don't ever want to have to write 'It was… — 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… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
“Bleecker Street, Summer" Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare… — 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 always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
Who cares about a kid from the Midwest writing pentameter? It's stupid. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in… — 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
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
“Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes and bare… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
I don't know what would have happened to me as a writer if I had gone to England and shaped my life… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I'd gone to England. I might have developed a… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
I write plays and poetry at the same time, and I'm always refining, but I'm not obsessive about it. It's what I… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of… — 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 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
