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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 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."
"We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?"
"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 am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era."
"Discretion is not the better part of biography."
"Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography."
Explore more quotes by Derek Walcott
"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."
"Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves."
"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."
"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."
"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
"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."
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