Jesmyn Ward quotes

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal. (Jesmyn Ward)

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

Jesmyn Ward

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

Jesmyn Ward

I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren't.

Jesmyn Ward

The reason that I like to use classical myths as models is because African American writers and African American stories are usually understood as occurring in some kind of vacuum - because of slavery.

Jesmyn Ward

My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.

Jesmyn Ward

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

Jesmyn Ward

So I kept pulling my punches. And later I realised that was a mistake. Life doesn't spare the kind of people who I write about, so I felt like it would be dishonest to spare my characters in that way.

Jesmyn Ward

Place is important to my writing; I believe that if a reader gets a clear picture of the place where a character is from, then they can understand what motivates the character, what limits him or her...

Jesmyn Ward

What mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It's tiring.

Jesmyn Ward

While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South. (Jesmyn Ward)

I read the last Harry Potter, and I cried for at least the last 70 pages. Awful! I was curled into a ball and I just kept sobbing. It was embarrassing. I was loud, and I just kept wiping tears away so I could see the page.

Jesmyn Ward

My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers - how on the one hand she spent more time with these women than with a lot of her friends, and how in certain ways they were friends. But then they weren't.

Jesmyn Ward

I know that I could, but it feels very unnatural for me to strip my prose like that, in part because place is so important to me. I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and tell stories here in the South, they use a lot of figurative language. The stories that I heard when I was growing up, and the stories that I read, taught me to use the kind of language that I do. It's hard for me to work against that when I am writing.

Jesmyn Ward