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"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."
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"I've always said, since I got to know him and wrote about him, that he's the generation he least appeals to is his own and I think in many ways he was born middle-aged and that's become apparent in recent years."
"I could be accused of glamourising crime, the favorite question on all journalists' lips whenever they ask about anyone writing about such things. The answer to that must be an emphatic 'Yes'. We've come to expect our icons of the criminal world to be larger than life, better than anyone else at foiling the final capture scene. We all love a good thriller ...."
"I was so incensed that I was oblivious to all as I ran over broken glass, holding a five-foot weightlifting bar. The glass tore the soles of my feet as I chased the gang's car up the street. I remember breathing heavily as I cursed failing to catch my enemies."
"Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography."
"Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's."
"I had to do the book because there was an unauthorised biography which didn't tell it like it was."
"I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era."
Explore more quotes by Derek Walcott
"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average."
"The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts."
"Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves."
"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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