Quote

I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me!

Jamaica Kincaid

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jamaica Kincaid
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 25
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Writer
St John's
Elanie Potter Richardson
Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson
Like
Racism
Grew
Possible
Society
Understand
Black
Didn
Really

More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

Image
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.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
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.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
when people say you're charming you are in deep trouble.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
There's something to be said about a slightly plump person—you have just enough of too much.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
It's not that I'm a very good person. It's that I think I should at least look at the ways in which I am not a good person, the ways in which I so readily become the person who would not notice that the wonderful clothing I'm wearing someone is probably dying for.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
It's too easy to say this or that is race, and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say Oh, she's so angry. If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes Oh, she's autobiographical.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
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.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
A piece of cloth that is called linen has more validity than calling you and me black or negro. Cotton has more validity as cotton than yours and my being black.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.
Jamaica Kincaid