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

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
Change
Writing
Something
Make
Suppose
Start
Write

More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

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I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another outside false, inside true.
Jamaica Kincaid
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the first step in claiming yourself is anger. You get mad. And you can't do anything before you get angry. And I recommend getting very angry to everyone, anyone.
Jamaica Kincaid
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A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.
Jamaica Kincaid
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I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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What I don't write is as important as what I write.
Jamaica Kincaid
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An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.
Jamaica Kincaid
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The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart—idea of thing, reality of thing—the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.
Jamaica Kincaid
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I would pretend when I was a child that I was Charlotte Brontë, because I'd read Jane Eyre when I was ten and, although I didn't understand it, I loved the idea that this woman had written a book. I wanted to be her.
Jamaica Kincaid
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I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation I could only count on intuition.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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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
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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
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I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.
Jamaica Kincaid
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America is not so much a country as it is an idea, and that must be why so many people are drawn to it, the idea of it, the idea that you might be free of your past, free of the traditions that kept you in your own traditions - that is the idea of it: freedom from your very own self.
Jamaica Kincaid
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I've never gotten used to winter and never will.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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when people say you're charming you are in deep trouble.
Jamaica Kincaid