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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

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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
Writing
Telling
Something
Students
Always
Law
Write
Become
School
Firsts
Doctor
First
Doctors

More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

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What I don't write is as important as what I write.
Jamaica Kincaid
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I was just looking at moving to Cambridge, and a house I was looking at cost a million dollars. Because somehow, that's what a house costs. And I was thinking, How can it be? And I was thinking, What am I doing? Am I going to be Niall Ferguson, that horrible man?
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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One doesn't have to pursue unhappiness. It comes to you. You come into the world screaming. You cry when you're born because your lungs expand. You breathe. I think that's really kind of significant. You come into the world crying, and it's a sign that you're alive.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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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
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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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That the world I was in could be soft, lovely, and nourishing was more than I could bear, and so I stood there and wept, for I didn't want to love one more thing in my life, didn't want one more thing that could make my heart break into a million little pieces at my feet.
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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I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life.
Jamaica Kincaid
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One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.
Jamaica Kincaid
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Race. I really can't understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both black and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can't take them seriously.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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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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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
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Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.
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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At the time I was taught to read, it was an Eden-like time of my life. My mother adored me. Everyone adored me. So I associate reading with enormous pleasure.
Jamaica Kincaid
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I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card - the kind that has a satin ribbon on it, and quilted hearts and roses, and is expected to be so precious to the person receiving it that the manufacturer has placed a leaf of plastic on the front to protect it.
Jamaica Kincaid
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My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.
Jamaica Kincaid