Derek Walcott

There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical. ”

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. ”

There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets' Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English poetry. The most compelling aspect of his work was his intimacy with nature. ”

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves. ”

How does a poet teach himself or herself? I think chiefly by imitation, chiefly by practising it as a deliberate technical exercise often. Translation, imitation, those were my methods anyway. ”

As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body. ”

I'm from the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean in the Lesser Antilles, the lower part of the archipelago, which is a bilingual island - French, Creole, and English - but my education is in English. ”

The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things. ”

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo. ”

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. ”