Jess Row Quotes

The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music."

You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.

Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.

If it had a name, he says, what would that change, exactly? Would it be more acceptable to you? Would it be a thing people do? Would it have a category unto itself?

Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.

It was one of the great pleasures of the age, to be safe and warm and dry - showered, deodorized, professionally clothed in espadrilles and a linen jacket, latte steaming up the radio display, taking in the world's troubles three minutes at a time. That was luxury.

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

It's possible, when you've been married for twenty-five or thirty years, when your children have grown up and moved away, to keep coming back across the tail ends of conversations you started in a different decade, and to realize that whole areas of existence have lain dormant all that time, like seeds in an envelope. There's nothing unusual about that.

Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.

That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements.

My parents didn't really restrict my movement, so I got involved in the underground music scene and the activism scene; I was doing some volunteering in food relief. I spent a lot of time throughout the city in poor areas, even though my family lived in a wealthy area.

Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to justify imperialism and slavery. They're categories intended for the enforcement of power. They were never intended to be psychologically satisfying in the way we want them to be.

What I was pointing to was that, yeah, blackness is a fiction; whiteness is a fiction. When we live according to these categories, we're living within a fiction. Of course, it's a fiction with very real consequences.

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

Country's friggin' dying, man, you have to triage the motherfucker.

I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.

In the first couple of weeks there were big piles of trash outside every house. All the stuff you couldn't find another use for and couldn't compost. Yogurt cups, torn trash bags, dirty diapers, hair-spray cans, paper towels. Sometimes you'd see a pile that was as high as your waist. Nathan said it was a purge, a cleanse. But you could just as well say that who we were went out with the empties. We will never get our selves back.

The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

Hong Kong has been the place where the memory of Tiananmen Square lives on; Hong Kong people have become more and more committed in their resistance to authoritarian government, and also, not surprisingly, committed to safeguarding their culture and heritage as something distinct and worth preserving.

Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.