Tayari Jones quotes

When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth. (Tayari Jones)

I don't mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice. I would be doing this even if I wasn't a writer. I grew up in a household that believed in social justice. I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated.

Tayari Jones

I take mentoring very seriously and as a result I hardly get any work done during the school year.

Tayari Jones

I like straightforward names for my characters. When I get too symbolic with names or places, I start feeling like the characters and the story are less read, and I lose interest.

Tayari Jones

I think the NAACP isn't recognized enough for all of the work it does, especially in the field of law. They may have faded from view over the last couple of decades, but they are fighting the good fight.

Tayari Jones

When I first started writing, I was thinking of it as a book about mass incarceration, and mass incarceration is not a plot. It's not a story. It's not a character. I was at Harvard doing research on this subject, and I felt like I had a lot of information, but I had not yet found my story because I had to realize that I am a novelist. I'm not a sociologist. I'm not a documentarian. I'm not an ethnographer. And I found the story, actually, through eavesdropping...

Tayari Jones

I am always urging my students to honor their writing practice, to set up a schedule.

Tayari Jones

Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.

Tayari Jones

I do have a sister - I have two sisters.

Tayari Jones

I was kind of an invisible girl when I was young.

Tayari Jones

I take mentoring very seriously and I am on the board of an organization called Girls Write Now, where we match teen girls and writing mentors because it changes their lives. (Tayari Jones)

My first novel, 'Leaving Atlanta,' took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.

Tayari Jones

Adolescence is a modern construct and very American in so many ways.

Tayari Jones

The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.

Tayari Jones

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

Tayari Jones

There's also very little room for diverse expressions of black female identity. There is a place in society for a black man who comes off as uneducated but street-smart. That is respected in a certain kind of way. And there's also the Obama model of the black man who's been to the Ivy League. There's a lot of room. But I feel like with black women, when it comes to credibility, that respectability is crucial.

Tayari Jones