America is not so much a country as it is an idea, and that must be why so many people are drawn to it, the idea of it, the idea that you might be free of your past, free of the traditions that kept you in your own traditions - that is the idea of it: freedom from your very own self.
Jamaica KincaidThe 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.
Jamaica KincaidThe 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.
Jamaica KincaidFriendship 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.
Jamaica KincaidThe slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.
Jamaica KincaidAll of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself-though, thank God I had never committed them to paper-I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn't hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don't believe in that at all anymore.
Jamaica Kincaid