Madison Smartt Bell Quotes

#1. Haiti was founded by African slaves who rose against their European masters, had a revolution, and created a new state. There is no other such event in Western history.

Madison Smartt Bell

#2. To me, there is nothing more soothing than the song of a mosquito that can't get through the mesh to bite you.

Madison Smartt Bell

#3. Our cultural capital has changed tremendously on its way into the twenty-first century. Manhattan has been secured and sanitized; it's smoke- and trans-fat-free. In the boroughs, many of the old jungles have been cleared as well.

Madison Smartt Bell

#4. The country is too often assumed to be a backward place: The First World has trouble remembering that Haitians were two centuries ahead of us in abolishing slavery and in extending full rights of citizenship to everyone, regardless of race.

Madison Smartt Bell

#5. It's a marriage of convenience. Temporarily, so long as our interests coincide, however long it takes to dispose of that mob of petit blancs at Port-au-Prince. Afterward,' he waved his sticky fingers airily, 'everything will return to the way it was before.

Madison Smartt Bell

#6. One can't do anything alone in Haiti. Sharing and cooperation are so deeply woven into the culture that sometimes it's hard to have a separate thought.

Madison Smartt Bell

#7. In TheColorful Apocalypse, Greg Bottoms explores the frontier between inspiration and psychosis with the expressive power, the passionate fervor, and the faithfully unflinching honesty for which his work is deservedly known. This book is incisive, startling, and often genuinely moving.

Madison Smartt Bell

#8. Sometimes you don't get but one mistake, if the one you pick is bad enough.

Madison Smartt Bell

#9. I have always had a mystical attitude toward inspiration. That's my nature.

Madison Smartt Bell

#10. I don't call myself a very good Christian, but I think I know one when I see one, and I also think I know when I don't.

Madison Smartt Bell

#11. I had been an abject fan of Robert Stone since the early eighties, when I borrowed a copy of 'A Flag for Sunrise' to read on a plane to Rome. I was twenty-something, with a first novel under my belt.

Madison Smartt Bell

#12. I had a house in Haiti, in the hills above the North Atlantic coast. The house appeared as if out of a dream: my dream to have a foothold in the country. Like many concepts do in Haiti, the phrase 'pied a terre' became literal, material.

Madison Smartt Bell

#13. Imaginative writing has always been a solitary and indeed a somewhat antisocial activity. Apprenticeship existed, no doubt, but it was an apprenticeship to books and not to living masters of the craft.

Madison Smartt Bell

#14. In 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' Hemingway cozies up to revolution by romanticizing it (and not only with those execrable love scenes).

Madison Smartt Bell

#15. Nothing could have been prevented. But still you know that somehow something wasn't watching. Something let attention lapse, releasing everything that follows, as the weight falls from the air.

Madison Smartt Bell

#16. Hemingway's minimalism is based on the psychological mechanics of repression. An echo of his approach can be detected in a favorite trope of 1980s minimalists: a pattern of reference to dire secrets and hidden wounds these authors didn't realize they were supposed to have imagined.

Madison Smartt Bell

#17. Since the 1960s, exile for Haitians is a condition that ends only to begin again.

Madison Smartt Bell