Derek Walcott

The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I virtually had it all to myself, including the language that was spoken there, which was a French Creole, and a landscape that is not recorded, really, and the people.

I have no curiosity. I'm an island boy.

There's always a need at a critical time for poetry.

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.'

Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty.

A fisherman, say, working on a beach doing his job, may be photographed by a tourist because it's photogenic to see him working, and the Caribbean is extremely photogenic, so poverty is photogenic, and a lot of people are photographed in their poverty, and sometimes it's kind of exploited.

Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.

I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures. It is not inhibited by flourish. It is a rhetorical society. It is a society of physical performance. It is a society of style.

I grew up in a place in which, if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it.

I knew very early what I wanted to do, and I considered myself lucky to know that's what I wanted, even in a place like Saint Lucia where there was no publishing house and no theatre.