Jamaica Kincaid Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, People, Feelings

• 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.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Garden, Thinking

• 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?

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, People, Important

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

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

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Jobs, Writing, Jokes

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

• I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Schedules, Goes On

• 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.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Simple, Reality

• What I don't write is as important as what I write.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Important, Crafts

• if I'd thought that nobody would like it as I was writing it, I would have written it even more. But I never think of the audience. I never think of people reading. I never think of people, period.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

• If I describe a person's physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is "black" or "white." I may describe the color of their skin - black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I'm not talking about race.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Eye, Writing, Dark

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

• Writing is not a profession. It's a calling. It's almost holy.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Calling, Holy

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

• 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.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Thinking, Way

  "Jamaica Kincaid Hates Happy Endings". Interview with Marilyn Berlin Snell, www.motherjones.com. September, 1997.

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

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Two, Justice

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

• 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.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Fiction, Useless

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

• 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.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Believe, Writing, Thinking

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

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Want

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. March 24, 2011.

• 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.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Editors, Rivers

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

• 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.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Thinking, Race

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

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

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Children, Writing, Small Child

  "Jamaica Kincaid on writing and 'outlaw American' culture". Interview with Nathan Rostron, www.usatoday.com. March 7, 2013.

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

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Book, Writing, Finished

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

• My writing has always been met with derision or dismissal.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Mets, Dismissal

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

• 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."

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, White, Black

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

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

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Islands, Wanted

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

• 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.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Successful, Careers

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Philosophy, Book, Reading

• 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.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Flower, Writing, Garden

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

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