Roxane Gay Quotes

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.

One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.

Before I studied story, I was trying to write a novel, and it was terrible. It wasn't going anywhere, and I couldn't figure out what I was trying to do. It was really hard; much harder than I thought it was going to be. Now that I've studied story, I think I'd have a different approach and maybe I could actually get it done.

Today I must write a paragraph or a page better than I did yesterday.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

But, if there's any aspect of my career that needs attention, it's writing.

I'm still learning my craft, and I've been writing since I was nine.

I feel like I'm getting better at being a writer.

I'm a competent novelist. I'm getting better. But I'm a really good short story writer.

When I got hurt, I wanted to develop my skills from a storytelling perspective, do the work, read books. Develop things. To be the storyteller for basketball, period.

I'm writing; I'm teaching myself writing.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

You are what you know, as an actor, so you gotta try to know as much as you possibly can.

I've never invested myself properly in trying to write stories. When I write lyrics, mostly I write each sentence separately on an index card and then I lay them out and I just mix them up.

Writing is a weird thing because we can read, we know how to write a sentence. It's not like a trumpet where you have to get some skill before you can even produce a sound. It's misleading because it's hard to make stories. It seems like it should be easy to do but it's not. The more you write, the better you're going to get. Write and write and write. Try not to be hard on yourself.

The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.

I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.

The move to creating stories was a natural progression for me, but the most pivotal time was probably in 6th grade: That year, a friend introduced me to the stories of Ray Bradbury, and a student teacher introduced me to creative writing.

I have grown in my writing and I care about it now and I know how important it is to write stuff.

What one's goal should be is just to become a better writer and to tell different kinds of stories.