Top 44 Quotes & Sayings by Vivek Shraya

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Canadian singer Vivek Shraya.

Last updated on April 14, 2025.

Vivek Shraya is a Canadian musician, writer, and visual artist. She currently lives in Calgary, Alberta, where she is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at the University of Calgary. As a trans woman of colour, Shraya often incorporates her identity in her music, writing, visual art, theatrical work, and films. She is a seven-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, and considered a Great Canadian Filmmaker of the Future by CBC Arts.

Canadian - Singer | Born: 1981

Source: Wikipedia

Now is not the time for Canadians to be sanctimonious. It is time for us to be prudent and active.

Vivek Shraya

My art career often feels less like an art career and more like a career in educating, usually by using my body.

Vivek Shraya

I used singing as a safety measure. I would pay attention to what songs the popular girls liked, learn those songs from the radio or library cassettes, and then "accidentally" sing or hum these songs in class. This would impress the girls, who would then defend me from the boys.

Vivek Shraya

I do use art as a site of protest, particularly in relation to dominant narratives.

Vivek Shraya

I recently did a reading at an elementary school in Ottawa, and one of the children asked me if I was a girl. I said yes. Another child commented that I had a deep voice. I responded: "Can girls have deep voices?" There was a pause and then the group responded, "Yes!"

Vivek Shraya

When I was writing, I wanted every word to be not only deliberate, but musical. Precious.

Vivek Shraya

I couldn't write about love without writing about hate - specifically, how the experience of hatred embeds itself in the body and prevents love from entering or leaving.

Vivek Shraya

I don't yet know what style will be required for my next novel, but my sense is that each book will involve a new relationship to language.

Vivek Shraya

I have always considered the aesthetic of a project, including press photos, as a means to further the message of the art itself.

Vivek Shraya

I especially worry about the ways Canadians can be glib about our supposed difference from the US in our "acceptance" of "diversity."

Vivek Shraya

As a general rule, I tend to collaborate with artists whose work I admire.

Vivek Shraya

I feel like I have had to catch up to the art I've made, and learn from the protagonists I have written, especially in relation to gender.

Vivek Shraya

Making music has been connected to one of my greatest heartaches, because my own music has never quite connected with audiences. But it was this heartache that pushed me to explore other artistic avenues, like writing and filmmaking, and I ultimately feel most at home in a multidisciplinary environment.

Vivek Shraya

Children are receptive to talking about gender creativity, confirming the importance of the book as a means to instigate this dialogue at an early age.

Vivek Shraya

I continue to explore poetry.

Vivek Shraya

I am more likely to get paid for my art if it's presented alongside a white artist, so the questions around value and agency arise: What choices should I make, or do I have to make, if I want to be compensated for my work? Why isn't my art valued on its own?

Vivek Shraya

My intention was never to write a "trans novel" - which is perhaps an effective strategy for writing a trans novel.

Vivek Shraya

I worry about what Trump will inspire in Canada, especially given incidents that have already occurred here since the election.

Vivek Shraya

I am always hesitant to call myself an activist, mostly out of respect for the activists who are using their bodies and voices to protest or activists online who are constantly engaging and educating others.

Vivek Shraya

Despite the fact that I'm not highly skilled in any visual art, aesthetics have always played a strong role in my art, including my first albums.

Vivek Shraya

In my thirties, I have felt a greater urgency to make art that highlights what it feels like to be racialized, likely due to living in a country that obscures our racism with the idea of "multiculturalism."

Vivek Shraya

Of course, I can't separate my queerness from my brownness - if anything, my queerness amplifies my brownness, and vice versa - but I spent so much of my early twenties trying to erase my differences, often without awareness of what I was doing.

Vivek Shraya

In poetry, I didn't have to provide resolution. I could ask hard questions without feeling responsible for the answers.

Vivek Shraya

Art can sometimes be separate from the artist.

Vivek Shraya

Writing about racism requires a directness that writing a love story does not.

Vivek Shraya

I think white artists have a responsibility to be not only naming white supremacy, but to be using their power and privilege to support artists of color.

Vivek Shraya

My interest in language is steadfast, but I think each project and its accompanying intentions dictate how language must be used.

Vivek Shraya

If anything, I have witnessed the ways my art travels, or is rendered more accessible, when sanctioned by or connected to white artists.

Vivek Shraya

I would love to see more dialogue around the "responsibilities" of art consumers - how can audiences better financially support artists we love, artists who are doing the work, so that artists have a more solid foundation upon which to make art?

Vivek Shraya

As a person of color, I know race can't be stripped from admiration or preference.

Vivek Shraya

I have dedicated a significant portion of my time and artistry to making art that addresses various forms of oppression, including white supremacy, misogyny, and biphobia.

Vivek Shraya

As a brown artist, I have mixed feelings about my relationship to art and my "responsibilities" post-Trump.

Vivek Shraya

When I wouldn't leave home without my blue contacts or when I was bleaching my hair, I didn't have the language to articulate that I was trying to assimilate to whiteness. If anything, I was trying to "look normal."

Vivek Shraya

When I do book readings, I always incorporate music or singing.

Vivek Shraya

It's exciting to consider how art, in its ability to reveal, can be ahead of the artist.

Vivek Shraya

Should I be collaborating with artists of color solely because of their race and my politics? This question is weighted with my own worry that I have been invited to speak or collaborate solely because of my race, and not because of my abilities.

Vivek Shraya

Generally, I start by observing the existing and popular narratives in my social spheres and media, and the pressures I face in my own life experiences. As someone who is "newly" trans, I am constantly thinking about what the dominant narratives are around transness, how my work can push against these narratives, and how it already falls into these traps.

Vivek Shraya

Children's books have great potential to reveal new possibilities to readers, because the intended audience is at an age of genuine learning.

Vivek Shraya

I always work with text orally in the writing process, saying passages aloud to measure flow.

Vivek Shraya

I have been and continue to be committed to art as a tool to ignite, comfort, and discomfort.

Vivek Shraya

I didn't want to give the white reader an opportunity to think of racism as imaginary - a sentiment that is already a central barrier in addressing the problem.

Vivek Shraya

As much as I believe in the capacity for art to create change, and as much as being an artist is physically and emotionally challenging, there is ultimately something a bit comfortable about making art in the comfort of your own home.

Vivek Shraya