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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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Jamaica Kincaid
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 25
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Writer
St John's
Elanie Potter Richardson
Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson
Anyone
Mother
Verifying
Remember
Autobiographical
Book
Drives
Going
Mad
Something
Calling
Life
Question
People
Written
More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid
On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.
Jamaica Kincaid
What I don't write is as important as what I write.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
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
There's something to be said about a slightly plump person—you have just enough of too much.
Jamaica Kincaid
Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
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
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
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
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
I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.
Jamaica Kincaid
...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
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
But no longer could I aks God what to do, since the answer, I was sure, would not suit me. I could do what suited me know, as long as I could pay for it. 'As long as I could pay for it.' That phrase soon became the tail that wagged my dog. If I had died then, it should have been my epigraph.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
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
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
