I now see that good behaviour is the proper posture of the weak, of children. - Jamaica Kincaid

I became a writer in an attempt to understand and save my life, and it did. It gave me a life with a kind of privilege that I wasn't born into.

I didn’t really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn’t see how it was possible not to like me!

And so all this fuss over empire—what went wrong here, what went wrong there—always makes me quite crazy, for I can say to them what went wrong: they should never have left their home, their precious England, a place they loved so much, a place they had to leave but could never forget. And so everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned English. But no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that. The English hate each other and they hate England, and the reason they are so miserable now is that they have no place else to go and nobody else to feel better than.