A Quote by Edwidge Danticat
After the Dance was my first attempt at nonfiction. I'd never really participated in carnival, and I really wanted to go. It sounded like a wonderfully fun thing to do. And I wanted to write something happy about Haiti, something celebratory. And going to carnival gave me a chance to do that, because it is one of the instances in Haiti when people shed their class separation and come together.
Related Quotes
In college I took an acting class as a joke. It sounded like something fun and easy at the time. I had originally wanted to go to art school, but I gave all that up because I didn't want to be a starving artist.
There is this split between the Haiti of before the earthquake and the Haiti of after the earthquake. So when I'm writing anything set in Haiti now, whether fiction or nonfiction, always in the back of my mind is how people, including some of my own family members, have been affected not just by history and by the present but also by the earthquake.
The whole first movie [Twilight] was pretty fun. I had never really done a movie like it, when there's such a big cast of people that are around about the same age. Everyone didn't really know what was going to happen with the movie, but there was a good energy. There was something which people were fighting for in a way. They wanted it to be something special. Also, none of us were really known then as well.
But I think it's very key that there's a plan for Haiti. And we have to begin to - as progressives and people who are concerned about Haiti and have been concerned about Haiti, we have to begin to build some sort of consensus, a movement around the Haiti that the Haitians envision.
The whole first movie [Twilight] was pretty fun. I had never really done a movie like it, when there's such a big cast of people that are around about the same age. Everyone didn't really know what was going to happen with the movie, but there was a good energy. There was something which people were fighting for, in a way. They wanted it to be something special. None of us were really known then, as well. It felt like a big deal, at the time.
I just desperately wanted to be happy again in a way that wasn't forced. I wanted to feel like I accomplished something. I did this. I finished this record. I'm doing all the promo. I'm doing everything that I said I was going to do. I really wanted to be happy and normalized and I was tired of people saying I was volatile. I'm not. I'm a pretty normal person. I have problems like anyone else but I've worked so hard to be OK and I don't think that I gave myself enough credit for that.
When I recorded 'Sun,' I wanted to do something with more of a modern sound. I've never done anything like it, and it was fun for me to sing, but I'm not really a dance person per se. However, I would love to hear that song in the club. I think it's a really good dance song.
I saw a song and dance act at the carnival and decided that's what I wanted to do. I worked on my mother first, she convinced my dad, and I started taking dance lessons at the Maureen Bennett Studio.
Haiti, if you've ever met a Haitian person, they are just really positive, and literally, if you're friends with them, then they will do anything for you. So I think that's something that is, like, a really good trait, and I'm really happy that my grandparents and my dad's side of the family is like that.
My first visit to Haiti was in May 1991, four months into the initial term of Haiti's first democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. At the time, it seemed that Haiti was on the cusp of a new era.
I've always been quite careful about what I wanted to do. I've just never wanted to revisit old ground or do something that's easy. I want to do something that I would look at and go, "I don't know what to do!" The most exciting thing is when you're a bit scared, so I'm looking to find something that's really terrifying.
Those of you who have been there [Haiti] know it is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. It has everything. It has everything above the ground, and everything under the ground.... It is an amazing place. I strongly recommend that whenever you get a chance, if you haven't been there, that you go to Haiti. I think it was a certain Queen of England who said that after her death "Calais" would be found written on her heart. When I die, I think that "Haiti" is going to be written on my heart.
I've never really had a chance to play a bad guy, and that's something I've always really, really wanted to do. I wanted to experience that really dark side of a person.
I never really wanted to be a daily critic who goes out every night and writes 300 word reviews, I wanted to write essays. And that gave me the luxury to be able to go out and if it was lousy, I could just say, well the hell with that, I'll go to hear something else, or, I'll go tomorrow night; I as writing for a weekly.
I went to New York. I had a dream. I wanted to be a big star, I didn’t know anybody, I wanted to dance, I wanted to sing, I wanted to do all those things, I wanted to make people happy, I wanted to be famous, I wanted everybody to love me. I wanted to be a star. I worked really hard, and my dream came true.
I think there's something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn't want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
German
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist