Top 44 Quotes & Sayings by Jess Row

There's an enormous amount of obliviousness: a desire among young gentrifiers to see only the city they want to see.

White writers in many cases choose not to populate their fiction with people of color. A lot of what I'm doing is trying to write against that, not about race but against the avoidance of race that's such a dominant model in white literary discourse.

White Americans have the option of not having to think about race on a daily basis. People of color don't. Race is a major deciding factor in their lives and the histories of their families.

The truth is that much of the plastic surgery we see today has a racial or ethnic component because it has to do with inherently racial concepts of physical perfection, like the 'Roman nose.'

We live in an age that's very suspicious of preachy political rhetoric, which means that there's room for art that approaches these issues from the side - as satire, as parody, or as a kind of outlandish speculative proposition.

I try to think of the social function of fiction as drawing the individual toward larger social and political questions. But I'm also very comfortable in saying that my novel - any novel - doesn't matter as much as larger questions of how we can see justice done.

When I read 'Another Country' when I was in my early 20s, you know, as soon as I put the book down, my first thought was, 'I will never be able to write a book like this.' And my second thought was, 'I really want to try writing a book like this for the 21st century.'

It's difficult for me to imagine a circumstance in which you're disguising your origins in which someone doesn't get hurt.

Disguising your own origins is a deeply American impulse, but that doesn't make it any less compromising. The way I live my life is to try to foreground the tensions and paradoxes of being a white person who's interested in racial justice and reconciliation, rather than disguise or obliterate them.

As a white teen, I was very drawn to hip-hop culture, almost to the point of disappearing in it - there was a sense of having no sense of authenticity except this one that wasn't mine.

Writers of color are given certain messages - explicit or implicit - about what they're allowed to write about or what will be successful if they write about it. And white writers are given another set of implicit and, sometimes, explicit messages.

My greatest fear about a world in which racial reassignment surgery becomes common is that it then becomes an expression of all kinds of class privilege. You have a truly dystopian society divided between the people who can afford to be racially altered and perfected and the ones who can't.

There's a feeling among white Americans that there's no such thing as racial harmony, no such thing as a positive, productive relationship with people of color.

I think novels - or any art form - can have a powerful impact on people's perceptions of race, particularly if they draw attention to the absurd inconsistencies and stereotypes we all carry around with us and don't want to think about.

There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.

The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements.

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna - the insight that arrives through meditation.

You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.

The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music."

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.

The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.

I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

Hong Kong has been the place where the memory of Tiananmen Square lives on; Hong Kong people have become more and more committed in their resistance to authoritarian government, and also, not surprisingly, committed to safeguarding their culture and heritage as something distinct and worth preserving.

Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.

Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

My parents didn't really restrict my movement, so I got involved in the underground music scene and the activism scene; I was doing some volunteering in food relief. I spent a lot of time throughout the city in poor areas, even though my family lived in a wealthy area.

I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

Yale's endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.