Jamaica Writer Quotes & Sayings

I am yet to find one reliable friend in this crowd of shifting strangers. I have no true friends only mimicries, users and loopers. People popping in and out, keeping tabs on my life, not adding much credence to my existence yet not abandoning my life entirely because they know that greatness lies beyond the layers of this muck. It is up to me to discover those who are worth taking on this journey towards my destiny and the ones who will only get in my way. — Crystal Evans

The person who judges you without getting to know you has revealed nothing about you but exposes everything about himself to the world. The prudent one knows that true knowledge is not born out of ignorance but a desire to know before casting judgement. — Crystal Evans

A phoenix, Beirut seems to always pull itself out its ashes, reinvents itself, has been conquered numerous times in its 7,000-year history, yet it survives by both becoming whatever its conquerors wished it to be and retaining its idiosyncratic persona. — Rabih Alameddine

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job. — Jamaica Kincaid

I understand Los Angeles as a space where "real and imagined narratives overlap" in ways that disrupt both either/or dichotomies (Spanish or Indian, Mexican or American, Brown or White) and "linear historical understandings of this place and its people."22 — David Samuel Torres-Rouff

It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring. — Jamaica Kincaid

Another thing I like to say to my students is this: "How many Corinthians read Paul's letters?" The answer is none. They couldn't have cared less! There aren't even any Corinthians left, but Paul's letters persist. Paul was not a professional writer. He was called to something, and he sent his letters. That's a good way to look at it. That you might be making something that nobody cares about, but you have to do it. It's not that people should care, but that you should care. — Jamaica Kincaid

I didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail. — Jamaica Kincaid

You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard. And trying hard, as everyone told him, was wrong, all wrong. — Chad Harbach

Everyone who knew me as a child, they say they're not surprised that I became a writer because I wrote all the time. I don't remember writing, because I wouldn't have had the tools, but I think what they are saying is that I would pretend I was a writer. — Jamaica Kincaid

I do not know what to say, how to tempt you. If you had a price, I would pay it. If you desired particular words, I would say them. I would be anything you want, Jane. Just come back. Please come back.
- Matthew in a letter to Jane. — Charlotte Featherstone

The people who don't give you a standing ovation for the hurdles you cross are just afraid that you might win the race. They do not cheer you but they sit, lurking on the sidelines, biting their fingernails hoping you will stumble before the end. They secretly wish you will never win this race. But watch out for them, they will be the firstto stand and cheer you when you stand on that podium of success. — Crystal Evans

Peter Piper pecked a peck of pick of peck of pickled pepper. — James Joyce

Those who are coming from the gutters know that from time to time a piece of us will break off and float back to the floor from whence it came. Wealth can gray your eyes at the edges, money does not make you hover above human qualities, you are only a flawed being with much material gain. — Crystal Evans

I tend to have really interested conversations with employers. They enjoy my interviews and they always last a little longer than norm for i have so much to say and as one said, i am but a breath of fresh air.
I was asked what motivates me?
I told them my children.
When i was a child, i wanted to be like Oprah.
I want to be the kind of person my children will be aspire to be.
I want my daughter to say she wants to be like me. — Crystal Evans

If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals. — Jamaica Kincaid

I think in life there is only one absolute truth.
Death ... It's the only definitive horizon, sometime it leaps, runs across mountains and vanishes beyond oceans but the closer you get, the more you see and you know it is the final destination, the absolute truth. We are only living to die. — Crystal Evans