Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

I suppose you could say I love outlaw American culture.

Life has a truth to it, and it's complicated - it's love and it's hatred.

I've never let the criticism deter me.

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.

I wish that I could love someone so much that I would die from it.

Like father like son, like mother like daughter!

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 am not aware of anything below my neck. I live completely in my head.

I can write anywhere. I actually wrote more than I ever did when I had small children. My children were never a hindrance.

In my writing I'm trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other.

Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.

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."

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.

When I write a book, I hope to be beyond mortal by the time I'm finished.

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!

None of us seem to think that we should draw a line under what would be a satisfactory amount of wealth.

I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear.

I wouldn't mind being labeled as "angry," if it wasn't used once again to denigrate and belittle.

The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.

The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.

When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.

It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.

I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.

On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.

I write out of defiance.

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.

I've never gotten used to winter and never will.

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.

I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.

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?

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.

My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.

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 come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn't know that it was possible.

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.

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.

My writing has always been met with derision or dismissal.

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.

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.

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

A tourist is an ugly human being.

There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.

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.

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.

It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.

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.

Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?

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 would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life.