Derek Walcott Quotes

Sometimes I wish the public were equally aware of the men of our race in the cultural fields. You, for instance, have you ever bought a book by a Negro writer?

London's not a white city. So why should our catwalks be so white?

I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.

I am not a black artist, I am an artist.

There is nothing radical about Obama except the fact of who he is.

I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become. I'm me, and I'm like nobody else.

There's a whole lot more to the African-American community than entertainment and sports.

I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians.

I think people respond to truth. 'Straight Outta Compton' made $60 million over the weekend, right? That's not just a black audience. 'Empire' grew every single week. That's not just a black audience. Black culture is American culture, you know what I mean? They're becoming more and more one in the same.

For African-American people, I am in the business of inventing a reality that gives a different perspective - on history, on crime, on art, on love.

'College Road Trip' is colorless. It's not a black film. It's not a white film.

There can be no racial animosity, because there are no races.

It's not enough even to have one black Barbie... because black women are not a monolith.

Even the humble black grandmother, who sings in the church choir and struggles to raise a grandchild abandoned to her care, must assert ideological liberalism in order to make others comfortable about her blackness.

Do I feel that white directors have to tell only white stories? No. Do I feel that black filmmakers should only tell stories about black people? No. If we say that, then that means Asian people cannot write about anybody but Asians. I don't think a woman should only write about women.

I never consider myself a minority. I see people who look like me in Barbados, in Trinidad, in Haiti, in London, and in Brooklyn. So I don't know what the heck anyone means when they call me a 'minority.' There's something about that word to me. It just minimalizes people.

People look to 'Dear White People' as an encyclopedia of our culture. But it's also art, and there are characters with different perspectives.

The black artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.

Look - I'm an African-American. I'm black. But I'm just looking at the character and trying to find his soul, his energy. If you can wipe away the blanket of skin and flesh that people tend to see, and look inside for the essence of the soul, then that's the work I'm doing. That's the work I always do.

I think that black people making art, women making art, and certainly black women making art is a disruptive endeavor - and it's one that I enjoy extremely.

I love Stuart Scott. There are a lot of people that tore down barriers that we don't really acknowledge sometimes. He was one. I think James Brown was too. That cat was a soul brother when it wasn't very popular to be one.

There is an imagined thing called black culture. But culture is a construction. It is learned behavior, not innate. The black American experience is the American experience.

I believe in 'Black' as much as I believe in 'Bajirao Mastani.'

There has to be more opportunities for Asian or black actors.

White writers in many cases choose not to populate their fiction with people of color. A lot of what I'm doing is trying to write against that, not about race but against the avoidance of race that's such a dominant model in white literary discourse.