Quotes from Marlon James

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.

I think that's what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it's not a secret at all; men just don't know how to listen.

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.

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.

I think, for me, there's The Book I Should Write and The Book I Wanted to Write - and they weren't the same book. The Book I Should Write should be realistic, since I studied English Lit. It should be cultural. It should reflect where I am today. The Book I Wanted to Write would probably include flying women, magic, and all of that.

There was never a single murder in my neighbourhood; there was barely a robbery. It was so suburban, it was almost disappointing.

Caribbean literature only has to be true to itself. It doesn't need colonialism or imperialism. It's always been vibrant.

As a writer of colour, you have to be victim or perpetrator.

'The Daily Mail' interviewed my friends in Jamaica to find out if I was ever the victim of a vicious homophobic attack because, to them, I'm a gay refugee. But nothing like that happened. So, no surprise, that story didn't appear. I'm really pretty boring.

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.

Nobody in the game uses their feet, but it's football. I love how Americans can just claim something to be whatever they feel it is, despite clear evidence it's not. Like a football game with nobody using any feet that takes forever.

The problem with a book is that you never know what it's planning to do to you until you're too far in it.

Make me tell you something else about reading. You see this? Every time you open this you get free. Freeness up in here and nobody even have to know you get free but you." ~Homer, The Book of Night Women

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.

Never think about the past, that shit will fuck you up and you cant fuck it back

If you lived all your life with monsters, what was monstrous?

Life is love and I have no love left. Love has drained itself from me, and run to a river like this one.

Nobody ever own a gun. You don't know that until you own one.

You think as they do that suffering from cruelty or escaping it is a matter of choice or means, when it is matter of power.

Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth.

Do you know what we mean by Cold War? —War don't have no temperature.

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

every time you reach the edge, the edge move ahead of you like a shadow until the whole world is a ghetto, and you wait.

Everything in the world cooks down to two. Either- or, if-then, yes-no, night-day, good-bad. You all believe in twos so much I wonder if any of you can count to three.