Kiese Laymon Quotes

#1. The worst of me wants credit for intending to do right by Jermaine, and has no intentions of disrupting my life for the needs of a cousin I always looked up to.

Kiese Laymon

#2. 4. If you push yourself hard in the direction of freedom, compassion, and excellence, you will recover.
True/False

Kiese Laymon

#3. People always say change takes time. It's true, but really it's people who change people, and then those people have to decide if they really want to stay the new people that they're changed into.

Kiese Laymon

#4. When you get saved, act like you got some sense. You hear me? Whole lotta folks get saved and it take them an entire life before they start living by God's word. That's them ol' deathbed conversioners, them ol' heathens trying to get to heaven a lifetime too late.

Kiese Laymon

#5. Black is not a vice. Nor is segregation a virtue.

Kiese Laymon

#6. First of all, the novel should be a critique of the novels that have come before it in a language that broadens the audience of American literature. Second, it's really got to be invested in a number of what-if questions.

Kiese Laymon

#7. The man of courage is not the man who did not face adversity. The man of courage is the man who faced adversity and spoke to it. The man of courage tells adversity, "You're trespassing and I give you no authority to steal my joy, my faith or my hope.

Kiese Laymon

#8. Not so deep down, we all know that safety is an illusion, that only character melds us together. That's why most of us do everything we can (healthy and unhealthy) to ward off that real feeling of standing alone so close to the edge of the world.

Kiese Laymon

#9. Long Division has a lot of Afrosurrealist impulses. I think the book was more Afrofuturist when it was like 700 pages.

Kiese Laymon

#10. I'm not good enough as a person and definitely not good enough as a writer.

Kiese Laymon

#11. I took out my brush and got to brushing the waves on the back of my head.

Kiese Laymon

#12. We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.

Kiese Laymon

#13. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers have paid more than their fair share, and our nation owes them and their children, and their children's children, a lifetime of healthy choices and second chances. That would be responsible.

Kiese Laymon

#14. I wanted to create a book that was unafraid of black bodies, yet super interested in thinking about the relationship of love to body and sexuality without relying on tired understandings of "gay" "bi" or "straight."

Kiese Laymon

#15. In essay writing, I'm trying to push the form of expository writing. I'm trying to remember, trying to reckon, trying to find connections with the world, the nation and me, but I'm always trying to push the form, too, without being too obvious that I'm trying to push the form.

Kiese Laymon

#16. I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind of what keeps me accountable.

Kiese Laymon

#17. I'm a black writer from Mississippi. That's what I most consider myself.

Kiese Laymon

#18. If God needs to condemn anything to hell, it ought to be the idea of social death. Every day we commit an act of revolution, an act of treason, against a system that was never meant to guarantee our survival.

Kiese Laymon

#19. Black children need waves of present, multifaceted love, not simply present fathers.

Kiese Laymon

#20. The "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others" essay was so hard to write because of the memories, the sensory stuff, but also because it didn't follow the form of any essay that I've ever read. And the truth that I was exploring necessitated that obliteration of traditional form, I think.

Kiese Laymon

#21. Obama will win. We will win. Then we will continue to lose. And the right questions will never be honestly asked or answered, and it's all just too much.

Kiese Laymon

#22. One of the problems with a lot of "confessional" writing is that it starts and stops with the confessional and doesn't really tie the "I" into a "we" at all. I'm still surprised at how mad critics get at that kind of confessional writing.

Kiese Laymon

#23. I'm an obsessive writer who needs and loves revision. Writing helps me learn and helps me teach.

Kiese Laymon

#24. Daddy binders, bruh?
Obama: Governor Romney loves him some binders, doesn't he.

Kiese Laymon

#25. I'm interested in how the confessional is so abrasively critiqued today. I'm not really comfortable with simply confessing but I do think "confessing" is a major part of reckoning.

Kiese Laymon

#26. I'm also, than anything else, a teacher and a student. And without the four hours, I'm pretty monsterish. For real.

Kiese Laymon

#27. I wish every American explored the importance of novel writing, identity, honesty, character and place in fresh-ass ways.

Kiese Laymon

#28. Your heart was good but you forgot to guard it. You killed yourself slowly because of this. The heart is the true measure of a man or woman. I loved you and I know that you knew I loved you. We all have addictions. Some are just more obvious to the eye. We are all dying, but we are all living.

Kiese Laymon

#29. I write two hours in the morning and two hours before bed no matter. No matter what. I also write during the day if I have to get something down, but the four hours a day is the one thing in my life I don't fool with.

Kiese Laymon

#30. Your letter reminds me that any love that necessitates deception is not love. It doesn't matter if that supposed love is institutional or personal.

Kiese Laymon