Top 100 Marlon James Quotes
#1. I'm not saying he's stingy. But sometimes when you're too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness. It's not that either. He's from a generation that never expected to get midway up the ladder so when he got there he was too stunned to dare to climb higher.
Marlon James
#2. You sure you can handle big woman chat, pickney? You sure you ready for that journey? You think good before you answer. Because some people about to forget that me be the head bloodcloth nigger in here. Now, go peel two potato and don't draw me tongue out in this place.
Marlon James
#3. Worse, you all present tense and have to deal with sudden past tense all around you. It's like realizing somebody rob you a year late.
Marlon James
#4. - Do you know what we mean by Cold War?
- War don't have no temperature.
Marlon James
#5. I grew up with reggae. Reggae is like family. I know it, and there's a type of love and familiarity, but sometimes you want to hang out with other people.
Marlon James
#6. What I find, particularly with young writers and readers, is that they don't want complicated feelings.
Marlon James
#7. Something else that her mind answer before the question ask. She know the answer. She can't help nobody out of white man power, not even herself. The woman eye still asking. Lilith don't know how to fix her eye to say no, so she look at the man and the same question come over him face.
Marlon James
#8. Fucking hell. Shit sounds like I'm writing for ladies who lunch on Fifth Avenue. Unending vortex of ugly? Holy sensationalism, Batman! Who the fuck am I writing for? I could move in closer, get to the real Singer, but I'll just fail like every other journalist
Marlon James
#9. I swear to God I can't remember when I had a handbag. I know for some woman it's like an eleventh finger and you don't even think about it, even if you change every day. But I can't remember the handbag either. Who can run with a handbag?
Marlon James
#10. Anything you want to know about Kingston's green versus orange war, everything you ever need to know about the rudeboy-cum-gunman is not in Bob Marley's lyrics or in Peter Tosh's but in Marty Robbins's "Big Iron." He's
Marlon James
#11. The problem with proving something is that instead of leaving you alone people never stop giving you new things to prove, harder things.
Marlon James
#13. People would say that if the Rum Preacher was all that stood between Heaven and Hell, then everybody had better stock up on asbestos.
Marlon James
#14. In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them.
Marlon James
#15. - Lilith. Named you meself. Did you know Adam had a first wife before Eve? Called her Lilith, but the bitch was too headstrong so got rid of her, he did. Headstrong, another word for uppity.
Marlon James
#16. My mother is so afraid of trouble that trouble sticks to her close just because he never gets tired of proving a point.
Marlon James
#17. In 1976, Rastafarians were one of the most violated, persecuted groups in Jamaica. They could be beaten within an inch of their lives, or detained for two years, just for being found in a 'proper' neighbourhood.
Marlon James
#18. I'm happy to not know what I think about stuff; I'm happy to change my mind. But it's relatively recently that I've been able to apply that to feelings. I used to like to know what I felt. I didn't want those feelings to be complicated or muddled or clashing.
Marlon James
#19. You never know when people's dreams are connected to you before you're gone and then there's nothing to do, but watch them die in a different way, slow, limb by limb, system by system.
Marlon James
#20. My first novel, 'John Crow's Devil,' freed me up to write about the past, and 'The Book of Night Women' freed me up to have a book totally based on voice and being very spontaneous.
Marlon James
#21. The dream didn't leave, people just don't know a nightmare when they right in the middle of one.
Marlon James
#23. I see the calm and hear the calm and know the calm can't last. Not for me, not for him, not for Kingston, not for Jamaica. For
Marlon James
#24. This is the thing about redheads, isn't it? No matter how long you've lived with them, you're always surprised when they turn and look straight at you.
Marlon James
#25. When dog kill puss, and puss kill dog, the only one happy is the john-crow.
Marlon James
#26. Nineteen seventy-six come and bring an election with it. The man who bring guns to the ghetto made it clear, that there is no way that socialist government should win again.
Marlon James
#27. Because homophobia is still largely driven by the church, it's legitimised. It's also tied to sexism, because those two are never far apart.
Marlon James
#28. Rastaman don't deal with negativity so oppression is now downpression even though there is no up in the word. Dedicate is livicate, I and I, well God knows what that means, but it sounds like somebody trying for their own holy trinity but forgetting the name of the third person.
Marlon James
#29. Police only have to see that me don't have no shoes before he say what the bloodcloth you nasty naiggers doing 'round decent people, and give me two choices.
Marlon James
#30. him swinging the baton and knocking out my side teeth and cracking my temple so that I can never hear good out of that ear again and saying let that be a lesson to never take you dutty, stinking, ghetto self uptown again. And I see them and I wait. But
Marlon James
#32. Learn this, all nice and decent people. An election year commence as soon as the first gunshot buss.
Marlon James
#33. Hate and love be closer cousin than like and dislike.
Marlon James
#34. Only a matter of time before you make enemies as ruthless as you, after all you're the one raising the bar
Marlon James
#35. Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview.
Marlon James
#36. I'd spent seven years in an all-boys school: 2,000 adolescents in the same khaki uniforms striking hunting poses, stalking lunchrooms, classrooms, changing rooms, looking for boys who didn't fit in.
Marlon James
#37. I think the Greeks were the only people ever to nail character. Their heroes are deeply flawed.
Marlon James
#38. The policeman move up the line saying, You can't fuck, go home. You can't fuck neither remove youself. You look like you can fuck, stay. You go, you go. Hold on, hold on now, you move like is you the one who getting the fucking. Batty boy, remove youself, and you, you better stay.
Marlon James
#39. Politicians rise in the east and set in the west and nothing you can change about them.
Marlon James
#40. A lot of time, I'd spell things in standard English instead of phonetically because I want people to understand what's going on. It's also very lyrical, and the great thing about lyrical prose is even when you're not totally sure of the words, you can be swayed by the musicality of it.
Marlon James
#41. The two men who bring guns to the ghetto don't know what to do since when music hit you can't hit it back.
Marlon James
#42. I find the violence in PG13 movies unbearable. This kid will never run home, never have another birthday. His death is slow, nightmarish. And you have to explore the consequences - the people who live on with this death.
Marlon James
#43. Can't play it safe when nowhere safe anymore
Marlon James
#44. I come from a very big family from every economic background. Some of the streets I talk about, I've actually walked on because I have family from there. Jamaica has so many contradictions.
Marlon James
#45. Whenever you hold a gun, it's really the gun that's holding you.
Marlon James
#46. Some man never get the woman who cure them from looking for another woman.
Marlon James
#47. After Tuesday come Wednesday. And what you do on Tuesday change the type of Wednesday that going come to you.
Marlon James
#48. Jamaicans are so unflappable, they might as well be Minnesotans.
Marlon James
#49. Sometimes I have to remind even him that three feet north of this vagina is a brain. Still, even an American man don't like when a woman's too smart, especially a Third World woman whom it is his duty to educate.
Marlon James
#50. Some people just fated to fuck up even when them smart enough to know better.
Marlon James
#51. If it no go so, it go near so. - Jamaican proverb
Marlon James
#52. At 28 years old, seven years out of college, I was so convinced that my voice outed me as a fag that I had stopped speaking to people I didn't know.
Marlon James
#53. There was never a single murder in my neighbourhood; there was barely a robbery. It was so suburban, it was almost disappointing.
Marlon James
#54. Gun Court lockup. He would still be there if Daddy didn't
Marlon James
#55. Maybe because is December. After all, only when we come to Revelation that we take stock of Genesis, right?
Marlon James
#56. I'm really interested in how non-American countries process race.
Marlon James
#57. The white man say we're fighting for freedom from totalitarianism, terrorism and tyranny, but nobody know what he mean. I
Marlon James
#58. Me love that man to the max. Me would take a bullet for the Singer. But gentlemens, me can only take one.
Marlon James
#59. Write about only three things: what you love, what you hate, and what you're deeply conflicted about.
Marlon James
#60. One of the things I fucking hate about my fellow Americans: whenever they fly to a foreign country, first thing they do, they try to find as much of America as they can get their hands on, even if it's food in the shitty cafeteria.
Marlon James
#61. Gorgon say that Callisto was a woman who laugh all her life but never smile once.
Marlon James
#62. Never think about the past, that shit will fuck you up and you cant fuck it back
Marlon James
#63. Jamaica never gets worse or better, it just finds new ways to stay the same.
Marlon James
#64. The fiction writer in me likes gaps in stories because I can jump into that gap and try to suggest something.
Marlon James
#65. I want to lie down in the grass on the sidewalk and I want to run and keep running.
Marlon James
#66. Is not gone, you're in the flatness of the deadlands. Time doesn't stop. You watch it move but you are still, like a painting with a Mona Lisa smile.
Marlon James
#67. Papa-Lo start thinking too deep and start thinking that he should be more than what he is. He's the worst kind of fool, the fool who start believing things can get better.
Marlon James
#68. the dead never stop talking and sometimes the living hear.
Marlon James
#69. I was the nerd. Because I was reading. I wasn't into sports. I was really into art. Very geekish about comics. Assumed gay.
Marlon James
#70. the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack.
Marlon James
#71. Then I wondered if everybody has that person that haunts them, the one that got away.
Marlon James
#72. Pretty much everything I've written is a mix of excitement and fear.
Marlon James
#73. I want her to look at me and smile just to show that she knows that I know that she knows
Marlon James
#74. Soldier don't act like we is crime and them is order, soldier act like we is enemy and this is war.
Marlon James
#75. Then coffin, black with silver handles with the dead boy in a black velvet suit. If you're never gonna sweat why not go out in winter style?
Marlon James
#76. That's what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing more than a literary device.
Marlon James
#77. When building monsters don't be surprised when they become monstrous.
Marlon James
#78. - You different, Lilith. You have more darkness 'bout you now. You turning into woman, Homer say to her. - Me turning into something, Lilith say.
Marlon James
#79. Some of the craziest aspects about 'Weeper' were the things I found out to be true. I mean, true of people.
Marlon James
#81. I always tell my students to complicate your characters: never make it easy for the reader. Nobody is ever one thing. That's what makes characters compelling.
Marlon James
#82. I hate when a man feels I'm obligated to disclose my marital status to somebody I don't even know. Even this bullshit about status itself as if married and spinster are the only two choices for defining myself. Or because I'm a woman I'm supposed to have a status at all.
Marlon James
#83. Listen.
Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school. You know where you're coming from and you're always returning from it. You know where you're going though you never seem to get there and you're just dead. Dead.
Marlon James
#84. Those who think he had lucky breaks are not only unaware of the real story but also fall prey to that sin of the mediocre: bitchiness about others' success
Marlon James
#85. That's the problem with peace. Peace make you careless.
Marlon James
#86. You ever feel like home is the one place you can't go back to? It's like you promise yourself when you got out of bed and combed your hair that this evening, when I get back I'll be a different woman in a new place. And now you can't go back because the house expects something from you.
Marlon James
#88. -Come on, Bill. As small as America's dick is, those limeys will stretch across the Atlantic to suck it.
Marlon James
#89. Woman breed baby, but man can only make Frankenstein.
Marlon James
#90. I'm not a writer on a mission, and I'm very suspicious of writers on missions, but I'm also not living a false life.
Marlon James
#91. We shouldn't romanticize rejection. There's nothing romantic about rejection. It's horrible.
Marlon James
#92. I hate that just because I live here I'm supposed to live politics. And there's nothing you can do. If you don't live politics, politics will leave you.
Marlon James
#93. Nobody ever own a gun. You don't know that until you own one.
Marlon James
#94. Preacher says there is a god-shaped void in everybody life but the only thing ghetto people can fill a void with is void.
Marlon James
#95. Now he is a man who could talk to God and the devil and make them work they difference
as long as neither of them have a woman.
Marlon James
#96. I laugh because me been dancing with shadow in the dawn and in the night. Even in broad, bright daylight we searching for the dark.
Marlon James
#97. They turned over the reception desk and the poor security guards did the only thing they could do. They ran.
Marlon James
#98. I wanted a picture of Jamaica that isn't in books, and certainly not in novels.
Marlon James
#99. As a writer of colour, you have to be victim or perpetrator.
Marlon James
#100. If you can break a day down into quarters, then hours then half hours then minutes, you can chew down any stretch of time into bite sized.
Marlon James
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