A Quote by Jamaica Kincaid

Everything I do is because of writing. If I go for a walk, it's because I'm thinking of writing. I go look at flowers, I go look at the garden, I go look at a museum, but it's all coming back to writing.
Writing is writing. It's an abiding, wonderful talent, craft, gift that stays with you your whole life. And you can go in different forms, and you can try them. Look at me: I'm writing novels because I found something I love because I tried it.
I'm just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I'm inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.
I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.
I go - I trace depression back to things. So I go, ok, I look back and I say my self-esteem was affected because of my skin and because my family had no money and I was ashamed of how poor I was. And I look at all of that and I was trying to hide myself. And so I felt like I was less than I was. And so that then leads to you being depressed. And I work on these things.
We all just meet up and someone's house or the studio and we'll just jam and we'll lock into something that sounds cool. I'll go home with tracks of cool parts and work on words. Everyone in the band has a job to do and everyone knows their job and we all do it really well. So, when we're writing, we can just look at one another and say, 'OK, go write this part'. It's not just one person writing or producing everything - everyone's working to product what we have.
You look at Libya, and you go, "Jesus, why the hell did we do that?" That's beyond stupid. That's so irresponsible and dangerous for our national security and frankly for the national security of Europe because you go and you look at where a lot of these refugees are coming out of, they're coming out of Misrata and Tripoli.
I don't really have a writing process. I don't write at all but, honestly, I feel like it's a modern-day writing because everything is technology and if I go in there and freestyle and I keep it, I feel like I wrote that. If I go in there and fix it, it's almost like something I wrote.
Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.
I think all writing is about writing. All writing is a way of going out and exploring the world, of examining the way we live, and therefore any words you put down on the page about life will, at some level, also be words about words. It's still amazing, though, how many poems can be read as being analogous to the act of writing a poem. "Go to hell, go into detail, go for the throat" is certainly about writing, but it's also hopefully about a way of living.
As I sit here writing and look across the room at Janice, I keep thinking of the most heartbreaking question: which of us will go first?
I just keep following the good writing. I'm not good enough to make bad writing look good. Some people can, and I admire them for it, but I cannot. I will go down with the ship.
You always see the guys who go, 'Walk away from a fight,' and people look at him and go, 'You're not really a fighter anyways. Are you walking away because you're strong or because of your cowardice?'
I have to go on writing because I wouldn't be able to go on without writing. It is the only function that works for me, and without that function, I would die.
I don't look like a fighter. I like it, though, because it just allows me to be in the position I am now, to where I can venture out to wherever I want to go. I can go into acting. I can go into this; I can go different ways now. And because of fighting, I can do that.
I studied physics at Princeton when I was a college student, and my initial intention was to major in it but to also be a writer. What I discovered, because it was a very high-powered physics program with its own fusion reactor, was that to keep up with my fellow students in that program I would need to dedicate myself to math and physics all the time and let writing go. And I couldn't let writing go, so I let physics go and became a science fan and a storyteller.
One of the things when you write, well the way I write, is that you are writing your scenario and there are different roads that become available that the characters could go down. Screenwriters will have a habit of putting road blocks up against some of those roads because basically they can't afford to have their characters go down there because they think they are writing a movie or trying to sell a script or something like that. I have never put that kind of imposition on my characters. Wherever they go I follow.
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