Derek Walcott

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

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.

They said I couldn't play anything but an English boy. I knew I could. So I went to New York.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?