Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

I spend many months in apparently listless rumination out of which I hope something will emerge.

There's no such thing as writer's block. I'm brilliant all the time every day. It never stops.

I do not go down and sit in front of the computer and make myself write; that's not my style.

Well, certainly I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

With reporting, if you work hard, you can usually pull something out. But writing humor doesn't respond to working hard, necessarily. I mean, you could just sit there and look at the page all day and maybe something will come.

I don't remember ever having writer's block. If I sit in there for four hours, I'll usually have something.

I'm a believer that you shouldn't really talk about the drawing until you're done with the drawing.

I'm a fictional monogamist - I can only work on one thing at a time - but each novel starts growing in my head when I'm about midway through the previous novel.

I could not have written a novel if I hadn't been a journalist first, because it taught me that there's no muse that's going to come down and bestow upon you the mood to write. You just have to do it. I'm definitely not precious.

I don't know if I am a good, average, or bad writer, but I write fast. Everything I observe, my experiences and imagination come together while writing.

A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum.

There is a prevailing school of thought that something good must take time, sometimes years to create and hone. I have always felt that the books I have written fastest have been my best - because I caught an unstoppable momentum in the writing.

I go through long periods of time when I don't write, and I'm fine.

Everyone has their down days. Unfortunately, that's when I am the most prolific.

Every day I write. I am not waiting for a great idea from heaven.

Sometimes you don't really know what you're going to write about. I mean, there's times where you get into a writing room and it's a complete flop. And then there's times where you get to a writing room and you're like, 'Oh, I'm just on a roll.'

I have read that, when you are writing or working on something creative, and your attention wanders, your brain is processing and working on what you have just done. But I find it hard to believe that my brain is really taking five hours to fully process the seven minutes I have managed to spend focused on one thing.

I often spend the majority of my time thinking and writing down notes.

I can't do one thing at a time. If I'm writing song lyrics, I've got to be doing the ironing or cooking or something while I'm working. If I just sit there and stare at the walls, I get nothing.

My method is, I just sit down and write a book.

I write most of my stuff when I'm on a train or a plane, any mode of transport. I like trains because you hear this motoric rhythm and the scenery is great. You go into your own little world. You don't have to be anywhere else.

I just write from dawn to dusk.

I write all the time and I try to think of ideas all the time.

It's hard to tell if I've had writer's block because it seems to me that it's when nothing comes, but, you know, every day you stare at that computer screen, and I think, 'It's never going to happen today. How can I write three pages?' And the hours pass, and they haven't shown up, and then at the very end it always happens, so it's willpower.

The space where writing happens is a unique space that's hard to define, and when you're kicked out of it because you're travelling or distracted, it seems so elusive and hard to defend because you yourself doubt whether it existed.