I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.
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.
In my writing I'm trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other. And the important thing isn't whether I'm angry. The more important thing is, is it true? Do these things really happen?
A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.
I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule.
Gardeners (or just plain simple writers who write about the garden) always have something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy at any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that.
What I don't write is as important as what I write.
All 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.
When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.
The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.
People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.
I can write anywhere. I actually wrote more than I ever did when I had small children. My children were never a hindrance.
When I write a book, I hope to be beyond mortal by the time I'm finished.
My writing has always been met with derision or dismissal.
In my writing, I'm often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen to explore that in terms of the black/white dynamic. Generally, a white person does not like me to say, or does not like to be told, "You know, what you did was incredibly wrong."
I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn't know that it was possible.
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.
Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy. The garden itself has become like writing a book. I walk around and walk around. Apparently people often see me standing there and they wave to me and I don't see them because I am reading the landscape.
Everything I do is because of writing. If I go for a walk, it's because I'm thinking of writing. I go look at flowers, I go look at the garden, I go look at a museum, but it's all coming back to writing.
The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.
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.
I write out of defiance.
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.
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.
In my writing I'm trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other.
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