Jamaica Kincaid Quotes
-
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.
-
I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.
-
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.
-
I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.
-
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.
-
I'll read anything. In fact, I'll read while I'm doing other things, which is not a good idea.
-
I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess.
-
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.
-
One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.
-
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.
-
I didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail.
-
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 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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they're not.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Everyone who knew me as a child, they say they're not surprised that I became a writer because I wrote all the time. I don't remember writing, because I wouldn't have had the tools, but I think what they are saying is that I would pretend I was a writer.
-
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 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.
-
I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule.
-
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.