28 Quotes by Madison Smartt Bell

Haiti was founded by African slaves who rose against their European masters, had a revolution, and created a new state. There is no other such event in Western history.

Since the 1960s, exile for Haitians is a condition that ends only to begin again.

Jeremy Popkin's collection of first-person narratives of the Haitian Revolution is an extremely valuable work, accessible, sound and intelligent. I only wish such a book had been available fifteen years ago when I was in the early stages of researching my series of novels. Popkin has been deft and tactful in stitching together these excerpts, and as a result, he manages to tell a complete version of the Revolution almost entirely in the words of the people who experienced it-this book engaged me deeply.

I dont call myself a very good Christian, but I think I know one when I see one, and I also think I know when I dont.

Imaginative writing has always been a solitary and indeed a somewhat antisocial activity. Apprenticeship existed, no doubt, but it was an apprenticeship to books and not to living masters of the craft.

Sometimes you don’t get but one mistake, if the one you pick is bad enough.

The city of the dead is older and more vast than the city of the living, and the dead possess the power and patience of infinity.

It’s a marriage of convenience. Temporarily, so long as our interests coincide, however long it takes to dispose of that mob of petit blancs at Port-au-Prince. Afterward,′ he waved his sticky fingers airily, ’everything will return to the way it was before.

I have always had a mystical attitude toward inspiration. That's my nature.