Roxane Gay Quotes

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

I like going back and writing fiction.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

I should say, I don't write about myself or my life. So for me, in fiction, it's always been about what I can dream up, that feels far away from me.

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

I suppose I'm pulled towards fiction because I really like the freedom it gives me.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

I would never make up a character who didn't exist or an event that didn't transpire. If you're a real writer, you have other tools in your toolbox to build drama.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

I love sitting at my desk and facing a quiet day with a pen in my hand, and putting myself into a story. It's kind of weird, isn't it? I mean, to absent myself from real life and make up stories is strange, but I started doing this when I was ten years old. It was all I wanted to do.

Take it from me: I really love making things up, which is why I write fiction for a living.

As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

I don't know that any writing comes easily, but I certainly get more immersed in novels. I don't think the routine is any different, but fiction tends to pull me further away from my life. When I'm deep in a novel, I don't pay bills and I walk around in one shoe, drinking two-day old coffee, and calling my kids by the wrong names.

I didn't have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.