Top 206 Quotes & Sayings by Roxane Gay - Page 3

It's a very weird cultural perception that if you're fat you're dumb, that you're lazy or a loser. Clearly, those are the preconditions for fatness. You're a failure, because only a lazy person, only a dumb person, would allow themselves to get into this situation. It's appalling that this is the mindset. People generally treat fat people like we don't know anything about anything. It's incredibly demeaning. And incredibly frustrating.

Intellectually, I know I am worthy, however arbitrary a thing worthiness is, and have always been worthy.

I write for myself, first and foremost and I also write for people, mostly women, who just want to be seen and heard and all too often aren't.

Sex offers incredible narrative opportunities and so many emotions are tied up in sex. Also, I mean, the erotic is always a fun creative space.

The other day, I saw a blog post where a woman wrote about why she was unfollowing me and that made me feel incredibly self-conscious and embarrassed about my tweets. I also feel more exposed now that I've become a more visible writer but then I try to get over all that and just use Twitter the way I want.

My fiction is a very accurate reflection of the world we live in. Certainly, in some stories, that reflection is amplified but America elected a man who enjoys grabbing women by their pussies.

It is deeply unfair to task writers of color with unique responsibilities that we don't assign to all writers.

Books are often far more than just books.

Truth can hurt so very much.

I am trying so very hard to stay in the moment despite the ferocity of my ambition.

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.

I never imagined any of the success I am currently experiencing.

If I cannot rest and relax, all the work I do is for naught.

Oftentimes, when a woman demands accountability, respect, or consideration, she is crazy or nagging or whatever.

The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this truth.

I like what the internet offers: the ability to get people interested in your mind, and have a chance if you're not conventionally attractive.

I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem.

The designation is useful and necessary and sometimes limiting but it is only limiting to people who think, for example, that African-American literature couldn't possibly be something they could be interested in or relate to. They have limited imaginations, which is sad.

Diversity in literature is, in part, about representation - who is telling the stories and who stories are told about.

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.

I'll learn how to rest, though. I can still learn new tricks.

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.

Twitter is my happy place. I am not there to overthink 140 characters.

I never imagined that I would be the kind of person who is recognized when I am out and about just living my life.

I am trying to keep growing and improving as a writer.

When I'm editing my work, I'm looking for everything to fit, to feel seamless, for every detail or line of dialogue or scene to feel necessary and organic. I approach the writing of others in much the same way while always working to preserve the writer's voice. To allow myself to be vulnerable on the page, I tell myself no one is going to read my work. There's no way I could put myself out there otherwise.

So often feminism is built up as this thing where you have to be perfect. You have to be consistent and you can't ever deviate. That's just not realistic.

Nemeses aren't born. They are made.

When you look past the image, a celebrity is merely a person you know nothing about.

I think hunger is a natural state of being for most people. I mean, hunger is a desire - and you don't only have physical hunger, you have emotional hunger. A lot of my hungers are, in fact, emotional. I think a lot of fat people's hungers are emotional. There are things we very much want, and it can be so difficult to satisfy those hungers. Yet we try. We try so hard.

I've always wanted to be a writer. I've been writing since I was probably four years old - it was nonsense, but it was still my little attempts at being a storyteller.

Writing has always allowed me to escape. I was a very lonely child. Because I was very socially awkward, I would always have trouble making friends. And so reading and writing allowed me to have friends and to have an active imaginary life that really sort of kept me sane.

Violence is not the answer but neither is peace.

Violence is a common part of far too many women's lives.

I don't ever rest. It's a problem and hopefully something I will get a better handle on in the coming years.

My dad is a workaholic so I take after him in this respect.

The more successful I get, the more I am reminded that in the minds of a great many people I will never be anything more than my body. No matter what I accomplish, I will be fat, first and foremost.

I probably write the same story a hundred different ways. I suppose right now I am looking for the 101st different way to write that same story. And the 102nd, and 103rd and 111th and 133rd.

I read constantly because there is so much to learn from the writing in the world.

I don't know that anyone in the United States is taught to rest.

I would like to believe that most people, regardless of gender, are good and kind. The good men in my stories are the rule. It's the bad men that are the exception and because I tend toward the dark in my fiction, you see more of the exception than the rule.

Emotionally, my ambition is not yet sated. Emotionally, I still feel like a kid at the adult's table, yearning for recognition. I'm not sure where this all comes from but it is how I feel.

What is it like to be connected to someone you can never get away from, for better or worse? I love trying to answer that question.

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.

Good fiction challenges us as much as it entertains and these days, we could do with both of these things.

I write because I love doing it.

I write toward both idealism and reality - how things are and how I wish they could be.

Most of the time, writing is a lot of fun, and not a small amount of self-medication.

Whiteness is not the default in my fiction.

The idea of life in France is a utopia where the women are beautiful and they eat cheese all day and wear designer clothes and are magically thin and more evolved. And that's wonderful. Over here, we're still fighting for birth control.

I look at my older writing to see where my weaknesses are and then I try to address those weaknesses and make new mistakes.

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.

The actual act of writing brings me such pleasure - to tell stories, to engage in cultural criticism, to reflect, to question, all of it is invigorating.

People of color are not under any kind of obligation beyond working hard, doing their best, and learning from their mistakes.

Generally, the ways we discuss the fat body pathologize it; we treat it as a medical problem and/or a social problem that must be solved. "Morbid obesity" is in many ways saying we are the walking dead. Or walking to our death. And that is no way to live, with that sort of moniker hanging over your head at all times. I think it forces fat people to internalize a lot of unnecessary self-loathing.

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.

I am interested in intense, unbreakable emotional connections and oftentimes, such connections can be found between siblings.

Knowing that a story needs to be told is a great motivator, even if telling a given story comes at a price. Writing Hunger has been the most difficult writing of my life, and it's the rawest and perhaps most necessary. We'll see how people take it. I always strive to write beyond personal catharsis because though I write first and foremost for myself, I do recognize that I need to look outward as much if not more than I look inward, so the reader has something with which they can engage.

Readers need to stop assuming characters are white if race isn't explicitly defined.

My dream was to write a book and see it published. I didn't dare imagine anything beyond that, so, I'm trying to keep my head on my shoulders.