Quote

When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!

Edwidge Danticat

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Something
Believe
People
Working
Reading
Stills
Still
Done

More quotes by Edwidge Danticat

Image
People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
I'm not saying Cubans don't deserve asylum, but if it is a national security issue, there are people who are coming from Cuba on hijacked airplanes. Why isn't that a national security issue?
Edwidge Danticat
Image
It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
In the 1980s, when people were just beginning to talk about AIDS, there were just a few categories of those who were at high risk: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. We were the only ones identified by nationality.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
Language is such a powerful thing. After the earthquake, I went to Haiti and people were talking about how [they] described this feeling of going through an earthquake. People really didn't have the vocabulary - before we had hurricanes. I'd talk with people and they'd say, We have to name it it has to have a name.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
My models were oral, were storytellers. Like my grandmothers and my aunts. It's true, a lot of people in my life were not literate in a formal sense, but they were storytellers. So I had this experience of just watching somebody spin a tale off the top of her head. I loved that.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically. . .
Edwidge Danticat
Image
When I meet people for the first time, I always put on my glasses because I feel like that's a little something extra between me and them. It's like the Laurence Dunbar poem We Wear the Mask.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
We try to keep the beautiful memories, but other things from the past creep up on us.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
We live now in a global culture where anything that happens in a place that's 90 minutes from your shores really affects you.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
...women, brave as stars at dawn
Edwidge Danticat
Image
The way the media cycle works, the way the news works, and the way people's attention span works, is that we only learn that people exist when there is crisis.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
In terms of the idea of long-term occupation - I have been reading a little bit more about this period - and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren't aware of.
Edwidge Danticat