Writers Write Is All About Writing
Writers Write Is All About Writing
Jamaica Kincaid

Literary Birthday – 25 May – Jamaica Kincaid

Happy Birthday, Jamaica Kincaid, born on 25 May 1949.

Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

  1. I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.
  2. Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you.
  3. I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It’s not spontaneous and it doesn’t have a schedule.
  4. One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.
  5. When I’m writing, I think about the garden, and when I’m in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.
  6. I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess.
  7. Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.
  8. I think life is difficult and that’s that. I am not at all – absolutely not at all – interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite.
  9. The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.
  10. The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark.

Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. Her essays, stories, and novels are lyrical, evocative portrayals of family relationships and her native Antigua. Other notable themes in her work include feminism, postcolonialism, and gardening. Her works include Lucy and A Small Place. Kincaid was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

Source for Image: Sofie Sigrinn, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jamaica_Kincaid_2019.jpg


by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 25th May 2014
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