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It's very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it's interpreted in some way.
Jamaica Kincaid
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Jamaica Kincaid
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 25
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Writer
St John's
Elanie Potter Richardson
Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson
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Doe
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American
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More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid
Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet.
Jamaica Kincaid
Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
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
I've written a book about my mother, and I don't remember anyone going to Antigua or calling up my mother and verifying her life. There is something about this book that drives people mad with the autobiographical question.
Jamaica Kincaid
One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.
Jamaica Kincaid
It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.
Jamaica Kincaid
On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
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
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
Sometimes when someone says something stupid, my friends and I just read the reviews out loud and collapse with laughter at the stupidity of it all.
Jamaica Kincaid
I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess.
Jamaica Kincaid
Often the lines that define the traditional European arrangement of fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. are not useful. These lines can distort the world we, people who look like me, live in - and by the world, I mean our personal experience of it.
Jamaica Kincaid
For me, writing isn't a way of being public or private it's just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It's a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided. This is the life I have. This is the life I write about.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.
Jamaica Kincaid
I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.
Jamaica Kincaid
I'm so used to being misunderstood.
Jamaica Kincaid
What I don't write is as important as what I write.
Jamaica Kincaid
