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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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Jamaica Kincaid
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 25
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Writer
St John's
Elanie Potter Richardson
Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson
Else
Another
Anything
Joke
Writing
Professional
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More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

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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
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It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.
Jamaica Kincaid
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The African-American is often used, and has conspired with the rest of America to be used, as a diversion from America's problems. I wish African-Americans would stop contributing to this sideshow. I also wish all African-Americans would cease to sing and dance just for a generation. I think we provide too much entertainment.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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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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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 was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.
Jamaica Kincaid
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...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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I can't get upset about 'offensive to women' or 'offensive to blacks' or 'offensive to Native Americans' or 'offensive to Jews' ... Offend! I can't get worked up about it. Offend!
Jamaica Kincaid
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No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.
Jamaica Kincaid
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It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.
Jamaica Kincaid
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There's something to be said about a slightly plump person—you have just enough of too much.
Jamaica Kincaid
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I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don't like tidying up the garden afterwards.
Jamaica Kincaid
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The photograph of my brother that is in this album shows a young man, beautiful and perfect in the way of young people, for young people are always perfect and beautiful until they are not, until the moment they just are not.
Jamaica Kincaid
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I'm so used to being misunderstood.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.
Jamaica Kincaid
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The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.
Jamaica Kincaid
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I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite.
Jamaica Kincaid