You know James Joyce said [in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] that he would forge the conscience of his race with "cunning, silence, and exile," and I have always thought that those were very weird things to say because how could you do it with silence? But maybe he means secrecy, because as far back as I could remember writing-I guess I was eight or nine years old-it was my secret thing to do. I'd hide my work and I would pretend I was doing something else, and I would write all the things that were forbidden to say. And then I just kept that up forever. I was very clear from a long time ago that I didn't have to share this with anybody-so that makes me very brave. I can always write it, throw it away, and I don't have to publish. But I do have to say it. Everything has to be expressed...Speaking of secrecy, did you notice that Alice Walker and Toni Morrison both began books with almost that same sentence: "You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you." " Alice Walker's novel [The Color Purple] begins: "You better not tell nobody but God," and then Toni Morrison [in The Bluest Eye] has the line, "Quiet as it's kept..." You see everybody has that same line; it's the same struggle to break through taboos, to find your voice. It's that same "exile, secrecy, and cunning" that Joyce was talking about.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "You know James Joyce said [in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] that he would forge the conscience of his race with "cunning, silence, and exile," and I have always thought that those were very weird things to say because how could you do it with silence? But maybe he means secrecy, because as far back as I could remember writing-I guess I was eight or nine years old-it was my secret thing to do. I'd hide my work and I would pretend I was doing something else, and I would write all the things that were forbidden to say. And then I just kept that up forever. I was very clear from a long time ago that I didn't have to share this with anybody-so that makes me very brave. I can always write it, throw it away, and I don't have to publish. But I do have to say it. Everything has to be expressed...Speaking of secrecy, did you notice that Alice Walker and Toni Morrison both began books with almost that same sentence: "You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you." " Alice Walker's novel [The Color Purple] begins: "You better not tell nobody but God," and then Toni Morrison [in The Bluest Eye] has the line, "Quiet as it's kept..." You see everybody has that same line; it's the same struggle to break through taboos, to find your voice. It's that same "exile, secrecy, and cunning" that Joyce was talking about." in the context of "Maxine Hong Kingston, in an 1991 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.