Jesmyn Ward Quotes

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

One of the reasons I began to write was because I wanted stories for my children where the characters spoke as they did and had similar life experiences.

The fictive structure, my work, my imagination, my books are about the details, the huge construction about culture, Islamic culture or modern Turkey. They're all intertwined.

I've always been inspired by Genet, Henry Miller and Hubert Selby, Jr., who taught me that you've got to tell a bigger truth in whatever you're doing, but the truth is not popular.

I love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A.

As a writer, I was shaped by a desire to write for black people. That things were not being represented. That was my motivating force. That it has become what it has become is shocking to me. I just wanted to be able to take care of my kids.

I think that the first book that made me think that I could try to be a writer - or that made me aware that a young black woman from the South could write about the South - was Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple,' which I read for the first time when I was in junior high.

Women writers are often conflated with their narrators - as if we can't consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.

I was very conscious of the world being this very crazed place that demanded explanation. I didn't see a whole lot of people who looked like me doing it on television.

I wouldn't say I see my work as having a political ideology. Lynn Nottage certainly has a political ideology. I think that the work is an extension of who I am, but I don't think that when I write the play I'm looking to push the audience one way or another.

When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.

'Blood Meridian' was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer.

I write about characters that interest me. And I don't think of my books as being forms of entertainment.

I do see myself as an old-fashioned storyteller. But there's always a touch of the political in my plays.

History has proven that art depicting black people cannot be disentangled from the political implications that such art has on their lives. As Africans were being stripped from the continent and sailed across the Atlantic to the Western world, depictions of black people in Western art changed in order to further render them racialized caricatures.

I love J. G. Ballard. I love authors who take the world as we know it and just tweak one thing and say, 'What if the world were like this?'

'Dhadak' has its own individuality and a story that deserves to be told to a larger audience.

I made my England debut when I was 17, against India. I was the first Asian to play for the England women's team, and I did have mixed feelings playing against the country my parents are from but I was born and bred in England and I've always known I wanted to play for my country.

I suppose 'This Little Life' and 'Brick Lane' both have things in common in that they have a female protagonist very much at the centre of the story, and they're subjectively told.

Most applicants to creative writing programs submit stories about the angst of their suburban childhoods.

A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view - something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often, people want characters to be nice, for example.

Salaam Bombay' and 'Monsoon Wedding' are the two Mira Nair films I go back to.

As a lonely teenager growing up in Virginia, I fed off any pop culture that could show me different ways of being from what I saw on 'The Cosby Show' reruns or read about in an Ann M. Martin book.

But stories don't only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.

'Namastey London' is my favourite Bollywood film, it is a complete pack - it has entertainment, drama, emotion and comedy.