Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.
Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.
I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn't know that it was possible.
I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule.
The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.
What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.
That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him.
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.
I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess.
I don't really do anything that isn't about writing, and I don't really know who I am if I'm not thinking about 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.
I can write anywhere. I actually wrote more than I ever did when I had small children. My children were never a hindrance.
The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.
What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her.
...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.
People only say I'm angry because I'm black and I'm a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do.
I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.
I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me!
I like to be in my pajamas all day. Sometimes I don't wash for days because I like to read and sit around. I like to eat in bed.
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.
The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.
It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.
I read about writers who have routines. They write at certain times of the day. I can't do that. I am always writing-but in my head.
I'm trying to earn a living in the way that is most enjoyable to me. I love the world of literature, and I hope to support myself in it.
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.
He must have smiled at me, though I don't really know, but I don't like to think that I would love someone who hadn't first smiled at me.
When once I got to America I fell in love with hippie culture, and I've always wanted to live in the country and grow organic vegetables.
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.
I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don't like tidying up the garden afterwards.
The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.
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.
When I'm writing, I think about the garden, and when I'm in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.
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.
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.
Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet.
At the time I was taught to read, it was an Eden-like time of my life. My mother adored me. Everyone adored me. So I associate reading with enormous pleasure.
People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.
Love and hatred don't take turns; they exist side by side at the same time. And one's duty, one's obligation every day, is to choose to follow the nobler one.
I swim in a shaft of light, upside down, and I can see myself clearly, through and through, from every angle. Perhaps I stand on the brink of a great discovery.
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.
Of course, every time I end a book, I look down at myself and I'm just the same. I'm always disappointed that I'm just the same, but not enough to never do it again!
It's very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it's interpreted in some way.
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.
Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.
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."
The families of rabbits or woodchucks will eat the salad greens just before they are ready to be picked; I plot ways to kill these animals but can never bring myself to do it.
I picked a name that was a combination of an island name and a very English name. Havana was one choice and Dominico was another, but I liked the combination of Jamaica Kincaid.
I think a woman is powerless if she cannot freely claim the right to her reproductive capacity. Society can talk about anything it likes, except a woman's reproductive existence.
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.
I can't get upset about 'offensive to women' or 'offensive to blacks' or 'offensive to Native Americans' or 'offensive to Jews' ... Offend! I can't get worked up about it. Offend!