277 Quotes by Jesmyn Ward

History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.

At one time, when I was eight years old, my mother and father, my brother and my sisters - we had to move back in with my grandmother, and there were 13 of us living in one house.

I thought about all those people whose suffering had been erased, and I thought, 'Why can't they speak? Why can't I undo some of that erasure?'

I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.

I feel a lot of pressure when I'm writing because I know, you know, if they looked at a synopsis of the book, what they read could only confirm all the stereotypes that they have about us and about people like us.

I'm still a bit of a reading glutton, I think, because I browse, read a bit of the back copy, flip through the book, read a bit of the text, and if it still seems fascinating, I read it. That's why my bedside table is so cluttered: I want to imbibe it all.

That larger story in 'Salvage the Bones' is just about survival, and I think that, in the end, there are things about this novel and about these characters' experiences that make their stories universal stories.

I think that fiction has a certain power.

It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that's something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.