Derek Walcott

My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race. ”

Poets are always making waves. I mean, you know, in an ideal situation, the ideal republic can't tolerate poets because - it isn't that they mutter and criticize; it is that the poet does not accept the situation called the 'perfect' condition of man - in other words, perfect in the materialistic sense. ”

The thing a writer has to avoid is being the 'voice' of his people and pretending he can speak for them. ”

I made a vow that I wouldn't be tempted by what could happen to me if I went to Europe. I thought, 'You could be absorbed in it - it's so seductive, you might lose your own search for identity.' Then, when I did finally go to Europe, I was able to resist it because I had established my own identity. ”

I think young writers ought to be heretical. ”

The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world. ”

My relationship to Britain is of no consequence. ”

When I come to England, I don't claim England; I don't own it. I feel a great kinship because of the literature and the landscape. I have great affection for Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin, but there's still this distance: looking on at what I'm admiring, separate from what I am. And that's OK. ”

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. ”

You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp. ”