277 Quotes by Jesmyn Ward

We're all about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, et cetera - I think that's a harmful mythology, that the choices that we make and the things that we do in our lives are not connected to anything else. So I'd like to help to debunk that.

After I finished my first draft of 'Salvage the Bones,' I felt that I wasn't political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about.

I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can't approach creative nonfiction like that.

While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.

It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.

I've heard some writers say that they are obsessed with certain ideas and that they find themselves writing around the same obsession again and again, but telling different stories to get at that same idea. I'm beginning to think that I suffer from this syndrome, too.

I was pleasantly surprised with 'Salvage.' I went to Australia and New Zealand for the novel and met a lot of people who had experienced the earthquakes in Christchurch. They responded very strongly to the book because they had been through these natural disasters and were trying to figure out how to rebuild.

I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.

People give the South a bad rap. It's often stereotyped as backwards and close-minded and dogmatic, and all of those things have been true. But I think that the South is changing, slowly but surely.