Jamaica Kincaid Quotes
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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.
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I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.
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You know how some people write every day at a certain point? I'm not like that. I carry something around for a long time. I weigh the words and the sentences. I weigh the paragraphs. The process is much more meditative for me.
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Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion.
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I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.
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One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.
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I didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail.
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When I moved out here to California, I became obsessed with geology. It's impossible not to be interested in the earth if you live in a place like this. I started to read a lot of geology, much to the horror of my friends.
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It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.
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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.
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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!
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I grew up in this poor place, with very limited circumstances, at about 16 years of age was sent by my family to work, and instead of remaining in the position into which I was sent, I somehow worked my way out of it without any help from anyone, just luck.
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I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.
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I have a sense of destiny because of my mother, who was an extraordinary person but a terrible candidate for mother. She was like the god Cronus, who gave birth to his children in the morning and then ate them at night.
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I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule.
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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.
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When I write nonfiction, it's always absolutely true. There will be no moment in my nonfiction where I have made something up and have to apologize to the bullying hostess of a talk show.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'll read anything. In fact, I'll read while I'm doing other things, which is not a good idea.