Derek Walcott

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

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.

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

I would rather do what I did than crawl in front of a ritualistic Left and lie the way those other comrades did betray my own soul.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

I also believe that writing becomes worthwhile and vitalized only through a full and exciting life.