Jamaica Kincaid
I'm always telling my students go to law school or become a doctor, do something, and then write. First of all you should have something to write about, and you only have something to write about if you do something.Collection: Writing
It's too easy to say this or that is "race," and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.Collection: Race
Sometimes when someone says something stupid, my friends and I just read the reviews out loud and collapse with laughter at the stupidity of it all.Collection: Laughter
I've written a book about my mother, and I don't remember anyone going to Antigua or calling up my mother and verifying her life. There is something about this book that drives people mad with the autobiographical question.Collection: Mother
None of us seem to think that we should draw a line under what would be a satisfactory amount of wealth.Collection: Thinking
If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals.Collection: Writing
So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.Collection: Writing
I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life.Collection: Fiction
The strange thing about my life is that I came to America at about the time when racial attitudes were changing. This was a big help to me. Also, the people who were most cruel to me when I first came to America were black Americans. They made absolute fun of the way I talked, the way I dressed. I couldn't dance. The people who were most kind and loving to me were white people. So what can one make of that? Perhaps it was a coincidence that all the people who found me strange were black and all the people who didn't were white.Collection: Fun
Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.Collection: Thinking
If I actually ran the world, I'd do it from the kitchen. It's not anything deliberate or a statement or anything, that's just how I understand things. It's arranged along informal lines.Collection: Kitchen
I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true.Collection: Two
Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.Collection: Mother
Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?Collection: Real
All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself-though, thank God I had never committed them to paper-I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn't hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don't believe in that at all anymore.Collection: Believe
I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.Collection: Persons
I'm sometimes afraid I'll cross a line and it'll be difficult to come back, say, to dinner.Collection: Lines
In my writing I'm trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other.Collection: Writing
Every time I end a book, I look down at myself.Collection: Book
But you know, where did the Brontes go to college? Where did George Eliot go to college? Where did Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or George Washington go? Did George Washington go to college? This idea which we now have that people ought to have these credentials is really ridiculous. Where did Homer go to college?Collection: Teaching
Everything I do is because of writing. If I go for a walk, it's because I'm thinking of writing. I go look at flowers, I go look at the garden, I go look at a museum, but it's all coming back to writing.Collection: Flower
the first step in claiming yourself is anger. You get mad. And you can't do anything before you get angry. And I recommend getting very angry to everyone, anyone.Collection: Anger
Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.Collection: Romance
You know how they say a man's house is his castle? I think for a woman, it's her body. I feel so strongly about a woman's right to choose. This is my Zionism. It's not a "right" any more than it's a right to breathe, to take in oxygen.Collection: Men
A piece of cloth that is called "linen" has more validity than calling you and me "black" or "negro." "Cotton" has more validity as cotton than yours and my being "black."Collection: Black
I'm always surprised to hear or read my work described, "In angry tones, she says." No! In truthful tones! Does truth have a tone? I don't know.Collection: Doe
I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.Collection: People
Here I am, a product of something really vicious, product of the Atlantic slave trade. And yet, I give nary a thought to some of the awful things happening right now in the world.Collection: Here I Am
The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.Collection: Writing
My writing has always been met with derision or dismissal.Collection: Writing
In my writing, I'm often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen to explore that in terms of the black/white dynamic. Generally, a white person does not like me to say, or does not like to be told, "You know, what you did was incredibly wrong."Collection: Writing
I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear.Collection: People
The thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it's the wrong thing. It's not a profession.Collection: Writing
I don't feel I'm angry. I feel as though I'm describing something true. If I had stabbed my husband, I could understand being called "angry." If I had an affair with my husband's best friend and written about that experience, I could see the anger. But I'm not doing that.Collection: Husband
The Holocaust happened in Europe, and that's important to how it is viewed. Had Europeans done such a thing in the far corners of the earth, rather than on their own doorstep, it might not be mentioned in the history books.Collection: Book
The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.Collection: Race
I wouldn't mind being labeled as "angry," if it wasn't used once again to denigrate and belittle.Collection: Mind
Another thing I like to say to my students is this: "How many Corinthians read Paul's letters?" The answer is none. They couldn't have cared less! There aren't even any Corinthians left, but Paul's letters persist. Paul was not a professional writer. He was called to something, and he sent his letters. That's a good way to look at it. That you might be making something that nobody cares about, but you have to do it. It's not that people should care, but that you should care.Collection: People
The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.Collection: Romance
For me, writing isn't a way of being public or private; it's just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It's a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided. This is the life I have. This is the life I write about.Collection: Pain
I was just looking at moving to Cambridge, and a house I was looking at cost a million dollars. Because somehow, that's what a house costs. And I was thinking, "How can it be?" And I was thinking, "What am I doing? Am I going to be Niall Ferguson, that horrible man?Collection: Moving
I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card - the kind that has a satin ribbon on it, and quilted hearts and roses, and is expected to be so precious to the person receiving it that the manufacturer has placed a leaf of plastic on the front to protect it.Collection: Live Life
In isolation I ruthlessly plow the deep silences, seeking my opportunities like a miner seeking veins of treasures. In what shallow glimmering space shall I find what glimmering glory?Collection: Opportunity
Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this.Collection: Crush
Life has a truth to it, and it's complicated - it's love and it's hatred.Collection: Hatred
I've never let the criticism deter me.Collection: Criticism
No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.Collection: Past
Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy. The garden itself has become like writing a book. I walk around and walk around. Apparently people often see me standing there and they wave to me and I don't see them because I am reading the landscape.Collection: Philosophy
I'm very aware that we make these decisions toward love or hate every day. I certainly don't have the stamina to live through each day making only the noblest decisions.Collection: Hate