Derek Walcott Quotes

I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.

Standard English is very imperialistic, controlled, and precise; it's not got a lot of funk or soul to it.

I wasn't aware that 'House on Mango Street' was so influenced by Spanish until after I finished.

The history of ideas is littered with the corpses of those who have tried to define culture.

We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.

I think for a lot of so-called post-colonial peoples, there's a feeling of not being quite legitimate, of not being pure enough.

I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French; nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.

So many white kids, English kids - we had no culture.

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

Come on, I'm from Iceland; I don't do hip-hop.

White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.

'Chocolat' was a sort of statement of my own childhood, recognizing I experienced something from the end of the colonial era and the beginning of independence as I was a child that really made me aware of things I never forgot - a sort of childhood that made me different when I was a student in France.

From a purely ethnological point of view, I was not a period-born Dada.

Caribbean literature only has to be true to itself. It doesn't need colonialism or imperialism. It's always been vibrant.

I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

Requiring this kneeling down of all languages before French is sheer linguistic imperialism.

Is it true that we must accept the music of another race as being that which is American? Have not the white Americans sufficient individuality to develop a characteristic style of composition.

The basis of any independent government is a national language, and we can no longer continue aping our former colonizers ... those who feel they cannot do without English can as well pack up and go.

The issue of American world cultural dominance is moot. All the international debates on the issue seem to be held in English.

I look Italian, but I act Irish.

If we deny our culture and become nothing and everything, that weakens us.

People looked up to us for our values and leadership. But today, they laugh as we are busy debating whether one of the seven wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal, was actually built by Indians.

Yoga is not Indian; it does not belong to India.

I was Irish; I was a woman. Yet night after night, bent over the table, I wrote in forms explored and sealed by English men hundreds of years before. I saw no contradiction.

From jazz, the blues, country and rock to Hollywood movies, culture has in many ways been our greatest export (or our most obnoxious one, depending on your point of view).