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" Everyone who knew me as a child, they say they're not surprised that I became a writer because I wrote all the time. I don't remember writing, because I wouldn't have had the tools, but I think what they are saying is that I would pretend I was a writer. "

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" 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. "

Jamaica Kincaid

Book

You

Way

" People only say I'm angry because I'm black and I'm a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do. "

" I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned. "

" I didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail. "

" I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place. "

Jamaica Kincaid

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Ocean

" I'm so used to being misunderstood. "

" 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. "

" When once I got to America I fell in love with hippie culture, and I've always wanted to live in the country and grow organic vegetables. "

" Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people. "

" For me, writing isn't a way of being public or private; it's just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It's a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided. "

Jamaica Kincaid

Way

Writing

" 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. "

" It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring. "

" What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her. "

" One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person. "

" I've never gotten used to winter and never will. "

" The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they're not. "

Jamaica Kincaid

Live

Things

" I have a sense of destiny because of my mother, who was an extraordinary person but a terrible candidate for mother. She was like the god Cronus, who gave birth to his children in the morning and then ate them at night. "

" I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule. "

" I used to want to be a backup singer. Not a lead singer, because I really can't sing. "

" I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes. "

" People don't make changes because things are wonderful. "

" 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. "

" I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people. "

" I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me! "

Jamaica Kincaid

Racism