Quote

If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals.

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
Writing
Professionals
Crap
Bound
Bounds
Writers
Writer
American
Write

More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

Image
On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
In isolation I ruthlessly plow the deep silences, seeking my opportunities like a miner seeking veins of treasures. In what shallow glimmering space shall I find what glimmering glory?
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
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
Image
...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
Image
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
Image
If I actually ran the world, I'd do it from the kitchen. It's not anything deliberate or a statement or anything, that's just how I understand things. It's arranged along informal lines.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
When I'm writing, I think about the garden, and when I'm in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
I'm so used to being misunderstood.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
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
Every time I end a book, I look down at myself.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
I've never gotten used to winter and never will.
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
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
Image
Once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted they are just human beings.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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