Roxane Gay Quotes
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Writing, at its best and truest, can offer solace and salvation for both readers and writers.
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Most of my favorite tweets go completely ignored but most of my favorite tweets are probably really lame or inside jokes between me and my [redacted]. See what I did there?
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Some women being empowered does not prove the patriarchy is dead. It proves that some of us are lucky.
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I love how I can see [on Twitter] some of the thoughts and ideas of my favorite cultural figures and still also chatter with my friends and family. It's a cocktail party with a fraction of the awkwardness of an actual cocktail party.
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I am fine with my books being categorized as African-American literature but I hope they are also considered Haitian-American literature and American literature. All of these things are part of who I am and what I write.
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I would love to see more acknowledgement of how challenging it is to feel positive about fatness when you can't find clothing. When there literally is not something made for your body. Nobody ever talks about that; all those fat girl clothes swaps and stuff are for a very specific kind of fat girl. If I was Lane Bryant fat, I would be joyful about fatness.
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I don't read the comments anymore, unless they are moderated. Which is not to say censored, but I don't need to read someone saying, "You're ugly."
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The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.
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I write toward both idealism and reality - how things are and how I wish they could be.
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My dad is a workaholic so I take after him in this respect.
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I don't know that anyone in the United States is taught to rest.
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Nemeses aren't born. They are made.
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When you look past the image, a celebrity is merely a person you know nothing about.
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I don't ever rest. It's a problem and hopefully something I will get a better handle on in the coming years.
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I thought a lot about how so many memoirs about fatness focus on weight loss; they don't focus on living with weight in a world that is rather inhospitable to it. So I knew that was the idea that was going to be most interesting and most challenging, and I like to be challenged as a writer.
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No woman or man is any one thing and the men in my stories, well, some of them are good and some of them are terrible, and most of them make the lives of the women they love much harder than need be. Why? Because that's the kind of storytelling I was drawn to when I wrote these stories, most of which are at least seven years or more old.
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I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem.
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And all the women are feminine, so we never get to see masculine presenting women and we never get to frame that as beautiful, which it is, and that's incredibly frustrating, so for every gain or benefit that the internet offers there is a liability.
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Feminism's failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don't regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes and how far we have come.
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It's gut instinct that helps me determine how to write a story. I love the surreal because I am faced with the challenge of making the unbelievable believable. That challenge is thrilling.
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Diversity in literature is, in part, about representation - who is telling the stories and who stories are told about.
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That the question of likability even exists in literary conversations is odd. It implies that we are engaging in a courtship. When characters are unlikable, they don’t meet our mutable, varying standards. Certainly we can find kinship in fiction, but literary merit shouldn’t be dictated by whether we want to be friends or lovers with those about whom we read.
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You have to be consistent. You have to be yourself. You have to be committed to what you're doing. You have to not be afraid to be ambitious.
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I was called a feminist, and what I heard was, 'You are an angry, sex-hating, man-hating victim lady person.' This caricature is how feminists have been warped by the people who fear feminism most, the same people who have the most to lose when feminism succeeds.
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We don't all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us. Feminism will better succeed with collective effort, but feminist success can also rise out of personal conduct.
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Readers need to stop assuming characters are white if race isn't explicitly defined.
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I am new to superhero comics, though growing up I read Archie comics, religiously. I've been doing a lot of catching up, reading what's out there and it's been wonderful to see what's going on in contemporary comics.
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Just write and love what you're writing. And if you're not loving what you're writing, take a look at why and fix that.
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Maybe I'm a bad feminist, but I am deeply committed to the issues important to the feminist movement. I have strong opinions about misogyny, institutional sexism that consistently places women at a disadvantage, the inequity in pay, the cult of beauty and thinness, the repeated attacks on reproductive freedom, violence against women, and on and on. I am as committed to fighting fiercely for equality as I am committed to disrupting the notion that there is an essential feminism.
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I can't please everyone. I am trying not to let the pressure consume me.
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