Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

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.

The thing to remember about the Declaration of Independence and the profession of freedom is that it was written by people who were quite free and who were surrounded by people who were not free. The people who wrote the Declaration of Independence were ventriloquists really. The obsession with freedom makes no sense when it applies to them.

There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.

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.

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.

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

when people say you're charming you are in deep trouble.

That is how I came to think that heavy and hard was the beginning of living, real living; and though I might not end up with a mark on my cheek, I had no doubt that I would end up with a mark somewhere.

Children like their mothers especially to be standing still and watching them, even if they are sleeping. At least that's how I felt. There's nothing wrong with the self-interest of children; it's just the way they are.

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

I like to be depressing. I feel it's my duty to make everyone a little less happy. You know that line in the Declaration of Independence, "the pursuit of happiness"? I've come to think that it has no meaning at all. You cannot pursue happiness. And to think that this bad little sentence has determined our lives.

Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.

I had come to feel that my mother's love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn't know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone.

An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.

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.

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

What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.

Had the Holocaust happened in Tahiti or the Congo, as it has; had it happened in South America, as it has; had it happened in the West Indies, as it has - you must remember that within fifty years of Columbus's arrival, only the bones remained of the people called the Arawaks, with one or two of them in Spain as specimens. Had the Holocaust committed under the Nazis happened somewhere else, we wouldn't be talking about it the way we talk about it.

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

Every time I end a book, I look down at myself.

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.

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.

Tomorrow exists even though I may not exist in it.

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.

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

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.

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.

A tourist is an ugly human being.

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

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'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.

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.

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 understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.

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

But no longer could I aks God what to do, since the answer, I was sure, would not suit me. I could do what suited me know, as long as I could pay for it. 'As long as I could pay for it.' That phrase soon became the tail that wagged my dog. If I had died then, it should have been my epigraph.

Often the lines that define the traditional European arrangement of fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. are not useful. These lines can distort the world we, people who look like me, live in - and by the world, I mean our personal experience of it.

I'll read anything. In fact, I'll read while I'm doing other things, which is not a good idea.

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.

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.

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.

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

A psychiatrist once asked me to draw a picture of my family. This is when I was a member of a family of four. I drew the three other people in the family first, bodies and heads. And then, last, I began to draw myself - but gave up.

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.

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?

The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.

I'm sometimes afraid I'll cross a line and it'll be difficult to come back, say, to dinner.

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.