I don’t like to hear people speaking in my work. I like reading it, and I marvel at people who can do it well. And there’s something when you see it … - Jamaica Kincaid

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamp-light. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.”

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

(Were there black writers you read as a young person?) I didn’t know there were black writers. When I met Derek Walcott, after I had written my first novel, he was so appalled that I had not ever been exposed to a West Indian writer that he sent me an anthology. All the writers in it were men, of course. When I came to America, I did start to read black writers, but they were political writers—Eldridge Cleaver, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). The first book I got from a library in the U.S. was An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, by Gunnar Myrdal. I didn’t understand race in America at all.