I hate all that nonsense about not touching the colonialists' language. All that about it being corrupting and belonging to the master and making you Caliban. That thinking just denies you an outlet. You deny everything that is great from a language, whether it is Conrad or Shakespeare.
— Derek Walcott
My mother hid the struggle from us children. She complained about her salary, and she had a tough time. Although she became a headmistress, she still had to do a lot of sewing. The more I think about her, the more remarkable I realise she was. And she understood straight away when I said that I wanted to write.
I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don't affect your work.
The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it.
A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is.
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 strong thing.
The myth of Naipaul... has long been a farce.
I don't think there is any such thing as a black writer or a white writer. Ultimately, there is someone whom one reads.
After a while, when the writer is mature, it doesn't really matter - not because of finances but because of reputation. It doesn't really matter how many awards you get.
If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.
I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer.
The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.
My body's urge is to be in a pair of shorts, working and going down to the beach.
Rhyme is an attempt to reassemble and reaffirm the possibility of paradise. There is a wholeness, a serenity, in sounds coupling to form a memory.
If music goes out of language, then you are in bad trouble.
I have to live, socially, in an almost unfinished society. Among the almost great, among the almost true, among the almost honest. That allows me to describe the anguish.
What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it's better than anybody else's because it's yours. It's extremely provincial and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be, 'Don't read Shakespeare because he was white.'
The headmaster asked to read one of my poems at some celebration or other when I was about 10. When I look back, that is phenomenal encouragement.
You can't read to yourself. It's your inner ear that hears a poem. If you hear a poet read his own work, it becomes very exciting. The melody is a great part of it.
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 like to do, what I've always wanted to do.
In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.
For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I have tried to give that world an exposure so the world can better understand it.
I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I'd gone to England. I might have developed a cynicism about my origins, a belittling of them, or an excessive nostalgia for them.
The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
My relationship to Britain is of no consequence.
I am not in England; I live in the Caribbean. So I am not hungover by prizes and awards because it does not happen very often.
Where I come from, we sing poetry.
Anybody great, we're all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it.
Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole.
As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body.
I'm read in the Caribbean with justice, with fairness. What I expect it to do is to encourage articulacy in the young.
What makes a poem is the discipline inherent in making a poem: trying to fit feelings in the requisite number of syllables and lines, disciplining one's feelings.
What I described in 'Another Life' - about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened - is a frequent experience in a younger writer.
My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race.
I don't know what would have happened to me as a writer if I had gone to England and shaped my life out of England. Of course, I will never know, but I think I prefer what did happen.
Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting.
There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame.
The older I get, the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts.
The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness.
I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body.
I don't want to write poems about the royal wedding. I would have to be moved by the event.
My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a writer; both me and my brother wrote.
I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.
I'd rather have just one person who reads and feels my work deeply than hundreds of thousands who read it but don't really care about.
Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has 12 syllables in a line, the challenge is, 'How can I interpret the meaning and contain it without going one syllable over?'
I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.
When you're young, influences count.
I didn't pass the scholarship exam for Oxford because of poor mathematics.
Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.
