If your depiction of loss doesn't make the reader feel loss, then you didn't depict it right. — Marlon James Copy Share Image
My first novel, 'John Crow's Devil,' freed me up to write about the past, and 'The Book of Night Women' freed me… — Marlon James Copy Share Image
Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You… — Marlon James Copy Share Image
What I find, particularly with young writers and readers, is that they don't want complicated feelings. — Marlon James Copy Share Image
I always tell my students to complicate your characters: never make it easy for the reader. Nobody is ever one thing. That's… — Marlon James Copy Share Image
Caribbean literature only has to be true to itself. It doesn't need colonialism or imperialism. It's always been vibrant. — Marlon James Copy Share Image
I think, for me, there's The Book I Should Write and The Book I Wanted to Write - and they weren't the… — Marlon James Copy Share Image
I wanted a picture of Jamaica that isn't in books, and certainly not in novels. — Marlon James Copy Share Image
“Make me tell you something else about reading. You see this? Every time you open this you get free. Freeness up in… — Marlon James Copy Share Image
“Nobody falls that way without being pushed. I know. And I know how it feels and looks, a body that falls fighting air all… — Marlon James Copy Share Image
“People think blood red, but blood don't got no colour. Not when blood wash the floor she lying on as she scream for that… — Marlon James Copy Share Image
The fiction writer in me likes gaps in stories because I can jump into that gap and try to suggest something. — Marlon James Copy Share Image
In 1976, Rastafarians were one of the most violated, persecuted groups in Jamaica. They could be beaten within an inch of their lives, or… — Marlon James Copy Share Image
“I miss you, sister," he say. "I miss me too," she say. Always too clever but not clever enough to know when to blow… — Marlon James Copy Share Image
What I find, particularly with young writers and readers, is that they don't want complicated feelings. — Marlon James Copy Share Image
At 28 years old, seven years out of college, I was so convinced that my voice outed me as a fag that I had… — Marlon James Copy Share Image
“The white man say we’re fighting for freedom from totalitarianism, terrorism and tyranny, but nobody know what he mean. I” — Marlon James Copy Share Image
“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… — Marlon James Copy Share Image
“She not black, she mulatto. Mulatto, mulatto, mulatto. Maybe she be family to both and to hurt white man just as bad as hurting… — Marlon James Copy Share Image
“Shiny like new zinc holding up a roof or a fence right beside old zinc, the material itself a living history of when last… — Marlon James Copy Share Image
