Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

In the past, I was sometimes put in this women's lit category, and I was never really sure that was the appropriate place for me - although I certainly recognize it can be helpful and correct for other people.

I like people who tell stories. I like storytellers. A lot of my songs are misconceived as being auto-biographical when they're not because I write in the first person.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I'm a writer... I write.

The novelist wants to know how things will turn out; the historian already knows how things turned out, but wants to know why they turned out the way they did.

I am definitely a storyteller, but probably not a traditional Storyteller.

Like most writers, I just create because I have a story to tell, really.

As a young writer, I questioned the idea that I had to write fiction in a world where I could write my own ethnicity only and nothing else. 'Fach' to me was a little like that. As a biracial person, that's an inherently unstable identity.

Truth is stranger than fiction-to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.

I can't say what most people are doing. I can only say what I am doing.

Labels don't mean much to me one way or another -- except when they close the minds of potential readers. I'd much rather we do away with genres and simply file everything under fiction. I know it can work -- one of my favourite record stores (Waterloo Music in Austin) simply files everything alphabetically and no one seems to have much problem finding what they're looking for.

Every character and person in life needs a voice and every once in a while I get to inhabit the voice of the misunderstood.

Gay people, certainly gay people of my generation, at least of a certain echelon - middle-class Americans - have binocular vision. We all are raised by straight people and grow up with straight people and in straight families, but we all have this totally other way of looking at things. Increasingly as I get deeper into middle age, that is why I resist plunking for any one camp. Because I have this delicious sort of experience of being able to see things in two ways.

You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.

These days I find myself wanting to avoid being pigeon-holed, ghettoized, held in a different category than other authors. And when people ask me if I'm a black writer, or just a writer who happens to be black, I tend to say that it's either a dumb question or a question which happens to be dumb.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. Even Vagabond - it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.

My situation gives me certain ideas about beauty or the excitement of life, but that doesn't mean other people can necessarily appreciate it.

I do definitely get boxed into this #BlackGirlMagic social activist category. But it makes me think, "Well, maybe people are able to start thinking about that concept earlier and will hopefully be inspired to delve deeper into it and research it more." I think that's just how the media works. It's just very good at compartmentalizing human beings.

We forget that the world is what we imagine it to be. We stop being the sun and become, instead, the pool of water reflecting it.

I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

I don't think it's always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn't imply people aren't multi-dimensional.