283 Quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

  • Author Jamaica Kincaid
  • Quote

    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.

  • Share

  • Author Jamaica Kincaid
  • Quote

    It's very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it's interpreted in some way.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Jamaica Kincaid
  • Quote

    All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself-though, thank God I had never committed them to paper-I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn't hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don't believe in that at all anymore.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Jamaica Kincaid
  • Quote

    There are things that make us choose, on certain days, on certain nights, the opposite of love, in all its variations. But I want to acknowledge that with love and hate it's not simply one or the other. It's at least two, three, four, five different emotions existing at once, side by side, a broad spectrum of things alive.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Jamaica Kincaid
  • Quote

    I can write anywhere. I actually wrote more than I ever did when I had small children. My children were never a hindrance.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Jamaica Kincaid
  • Quote

    The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Jamaica Kincaid
  • 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.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Jamaica Kincaid
  • Quote

    People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.

  • Tags
  • Share