67 Quotes by Edward P. Jones

It just so happens that I was born and raised in Washington. Had I been born in Chicago or San Antonio, the streets and places would have figured into whatever I wrote. Just so happens that it's Washington, D.C.

'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.

My father was Catholic, and my mother wanted me to go to Catholic school. That's what I did in first grade. But she couldn't afford the payments. I think it must have hurt her a lot, not to be able to give me a Catholic education.

My mother worked in the white world, but I lived almost exclusively in a black world. I don't think I had ever seen a white teacher until I got to high school.

The people I grew up around, almost all of them had been born and raised in the South. And, you know, they didn't always go to church, but they lived their lives as if God were watching everything they did.

There are those who write because they believe they have something so marvelous that it will make them famous and wealthy, a lauded commodity who will be invited to a lifetime of cocktail parties.

I'm fascinated by the awful, awful things that human beings do to each other.

Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.

Calvin had long been uneasy in his own person and so lived to put everyone else at ease.