Quotes from Marlon James

A man will suffer misery to get to the bottom of truth, but he will not suffer boredom.

People who say they don't have a choice just too coward to choose.

He is my friend." "Nobody ever gets betrayed by their enemy.

Jamaica never gets worse or better, it just finds new ways to stay the same.

When building monsters don't be surprised when they become monstrous.

Living people wait and see because they fool themselves that they have time. Dead people see and wait.

Bad feeling is a country no woman want to visit. So they take good feeling any which way it come. Sometime that good feeling come by taking on a different kind of bad feeling.

Woman breed baby, but man can only make Frankenstein.

When kings fall they fall on top of us.

I hate people like that, people you have to protect while they keep hurting you.

People stupid. The dream didn't leave, people just don't know a nightmare when they right in the middle of one.

...Love isn't saying, I love you but calling to say, did you eat

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.

We shouldn't romanticize rejection. There's nothing romantic about rejection. It's horrible.

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.

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.

We're not big on irony in Jamaica, sarcasm and double-talk. We tend to say things plainly, sometimes to the point of boredom.

I wanted a picture of Jamaica that isn't in books, and certainly not in novels.

What I find, particularly with young writers and readers, is that they don't want complicated feelings.

Pretty much everything I've written is a mix of excitement and fear.

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.

I think the Greeks were the only people ever to nail character. Their heroes are deeply flawed.

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.

I was the nerd. Because I was reading. I wasn't into sports. I was really into art. Very geekish about comics. Assumed gay.