I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the author's origins and how they shape creative expression.
Jamaica Kincaid's quote emphasizes the influence of her Caribbean heritage on her work, suggesting that both fiction and nonfiction stem from a shared artistic wellspring. This perspective illustrates how one's background and experiences inform creativity, blending cultural identity with the imagination involved in storytelling.
In practice
This quote would be great in a speech about the role of cultural backgrounds in artistic development.
Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.
Gardeners (or just plain simple writers who write about the garden) always have something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy at any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that.
I read about writers who have routines. They write at certain times of the day. I can't do that. I am always writing-but in my head.
I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.
I didn't think of myself as an outsider because of my race because... where I grew up I was the same race as almost everyone else... It is true that I noticed things that no one else seemed to notice. And I think only people who are outsiders do this.
The English language started out as a distortion in my life, but nothing remains the same, and so the distortion is now just normal. That is one of the things that will happen to all distortions: They become normal and turn into something else.
And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.
I treat auditions like I treated my first dates. It's an opportunity to get to know a stranger and to learn from each other.
My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.
Inevitably, every part an actor plays contains some of himself.
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