Quotes from Jesmyn Ward

I love creating that community and writing about that place, because I think, in some ways, Bois Sauvage is like the DeLisle of my past; it's like the DeLisle of the '80s that I can never return to. So in some ways, when I write about Bois Sauvage, I'm writing about a home that I've lost.

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

If I can get a page out in a day, I am celebrating.

I knew it would be painful to write a memoir.

As a parent, you want to protect your children, but the fact of racism in this country, of inequality, that is still a lesson my children are going to have to learn. I can't protect my kids from that.

I think that being a parent has expanded my writing, expanded my understanding of my characters, and has added a depth and richness to my work. Having kids deepened my idea of parenting and all the anxieties that come along with it.

People are not afraid to be activists, to be vocal. And I think back to my years in college, and that wasn't the case.

I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother's employer's family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home.

I think that the first book that made me think that I could try to be a writer - or that made me aware that a young black woman from the South could write about the South - was Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple,' which I read for the first time when I was in junior high.

I think that often in the United States we're very blind to the ways that history lives in the present.

It really bothers me when people say we live in a postracial America.

I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.

My mom is the kind of mom, when we would go to a friend of the family's house, and they would offer us something to drink or offer us something to eat, my mother would always say, 'Tell them no.' You could be starving - you could be dehydrated - but as kids, we were supposed to tell the host, 'No.'

People give the South a bad rap. It's often stereotyped as backwards and close-minded and dogmatic, and all of those things have been true. But I think that the South is changing, slowly but surely.

A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.

My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.

I love my community. I love always being able to come back and have a home.

I hope people who read my books feel empathy for us and really see us as complicated people.

I've heard some writers say that they are obsessed with certain ideas and that they find themselves writing around the same obsession again and again, but telling different stories to get at that same idea. I'm beginning to think that I suffer from this syndrome, too.

By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.

In American culture at large, but especially in African American culture, it's a sign of weakness to ask for help.

Physical books are still my favorite, but I own an e-book reader. They're convenient for travel.

I'm always curious about other writers' routines.

The first writer that I think of immediately that I studied with at Michigan is Peter Ho Davies. He was really important to me, tackling that first novel. Just writing it.