Jess Row Quotes

#1. I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

Jess Row

#2. The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

Jess Row

#3. There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

Jess Row

#4. Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.

Jess Row

#5. Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.

Jess Row

#6. There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.

Jess Row

#7. What I was pointing to was that, yeah, blackness is a fiction; whiteness is a fiction. When we live according to these categories, we're living within a fiction. Of course, it's a fiction with very real consequences.

Jess Row

#8. It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

Jess Row

#9. I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

Jess Row

#10. Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

Jess Row

#11. Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.

Jess Row

#12. If it had a name, he says, what would that change, exactly? Would it be more acceptable to you? Would it be a thing people do? Would it have a category unto itself?

Jess Row

#13. I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

Jess Row

#14. You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.

Jess Row

#15. It was one of the great pleasures of the age, to be safe and warm and dry - showered, deodorized, professionally clothed in espadrilles and a linen jacket, latte steaming up the radio display, taking in the world's troubles three minutes at a time. That was luxury.

Jess Row

#16. Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

Jess Row

#17. My parents didn't really restrict my movement, so I got involved in the underground music scene and the activism scene; I was doing some volunteering in food relief. I spent a lot of time throughout the city in poor areas, even though my family lived in a wealthy area.

Jess Row

#18. Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

Jess Row

#19. Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

Jess Row

#20. I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

Jess Row

#21. Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.

Jess Row

#22. The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

Jess Row

#23. The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

Jess Row

#24. I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

Jess Row

#25. For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna - the insight that arrives through meditation.

Jess Row

#26. Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.

Jess Row

#27. It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

Jess Row

#28. Country's friggin' dying, man, you have to triage the motherfucker.

Jess Row