173 Quotes by Derek Walcott

This image of us as being art supportive and very cultured is false, ... The money that we have now that is keeping this place going has come from Canada-the University of Toronto. When you come across sponsors like these gentlemen we have today, what it does for the individual artist is enormous. It means that we can feel that there is some direction to our lives.

I read; I travel; I become.

The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

She’s a rare vase, out of a cat’s reach, on its shelf.

I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don’t work, I study the stars.

I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there’d be no rest, there’d be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one’s biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

Art is History’s nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.