Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

I like the discipline of writing a script. You can't go into the character's head - you have to find these creative ways to help externalize what they're thinking.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage.

Writing is like a little hole in reality that you can go through and you can get out and you can be someplace else for a while.

What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.

I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.

Remember that a book is many drafts - mine certainly are. It's improvisation. It's as much jazz and the way we talk and the way I heard people preach coming up as it is writing.

Pico Iyer describes his writing as "intimate letters to a stranger," and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration.

I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. The two processes complement each other, creating a complete landscape that I treasure. The green foliage of the trees casts a pleasant shade over the earth, and the wind rustles the leaves, which are sometimes dyed a brilliant gold. Meanwhile, in the garden, buds appear on the flowers, and colorful petals attract bees and butterflies, reminding us of the subtle transition from one season to the next.

You know, writer can write about the Foreign Legion without ever having been in the Foreign Legion, but that doesn't necessarily mean that what he's written doesn't necessarily reflect the nature of him as an individual - or her. Using the male gender because it's me speaking. I don't mean to put down the female.

I love the writing process. It's something that I'm interested in personally and something I always do on every movie.

Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

I can remember as a college student writing stories and novels, some of which ended up getting published and some that didn't. It was like my head was going to burst - there were so many things I wanted to write all at once. I had so many ideas, jammed up. It was like they just needed permission to come out.

When you get an idea, so many things come in that one moment. You could write the sound of that idea, or the sound of the room it's in. You could write the clothes the character is wearing, what they're saying, how they move, what they look like. Instead of making up, you're actually catching an idea, for a story, characters, place, and mood - all the stuff that comes.

Writing good dialogue is art as well as craft.