Roxane Gay Quotes

All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts.

The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.

I'm still writing from personal experiences, which is what people connected with in the first place.

A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him.

I don't consciously try to take my readers on a journey as I don't really think about my readers when I'm writing. I just try to write what I feel passionately about, to tell a story down onto the page.

I was in the hospital and I was paralyzed and I went through all of these things. I've had all of these crazy experiences and jobs in my life, but I never really write about them because I've already told them as stories to friends. For me, the process of writing is the process of invention. But the hospital story felt told already. There was nothing to discover in the telling of it. The discovery had to be in the form. It wasn't really the unfamiliarity of the form, it was more about a way incorporate invention and how to realize it imaginatively.

I try to be very honest in my writing. It's amazing, though, to think that people are responding to what we do, but it's okay if they're responding in a positive way too, because I think just creating anything at all to put out there is a gift.

I'm just writing about people. People are dark and complicated. I'm trying to tell the truth; that's all that I do.

Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.

The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart.

Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.

I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.

My songs are my stories... good, bad, ugly, beautiful.

If it has something of substance and a platform that makes sense, I can share my story. You can get a little more into my life, and I can mesh my singing with things I love to do and writing for others and telling my story in hopes of helping someone. I'm all for it.

I'm a firm believer in putting your experiences in your writing, of bleeding into the page.

I really do pride myself on being able to help other people tell their stories and bring out the best in them. But I still, every song I'm writing, I still need to relate to it. I still need to find my true self in it, or else it'll feel dishonest. I mean, everything has a queer meaning as far as I'm concerned.

I write for my people.

Most writers write from their own experiences. That is where the honesty and intensity of emotions come from.

I realized that even though I had this urge, this longing, to write about other people, in order for it to be emotionally gripping, I needed to be in there somehow.

I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone's scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that's how I write.

I'm not a gifted storyteller, so I write what I know and hope that honesty resonates with other people's experiences.

To be a great creator, you have to be vulnerable. You're creating characters that have a little bit of yourself in them... And you want to know it's a safe environment for that.

I have learned to write about things that are personal without objectifying anybody or anything, and that's been an important lesson for me. It's useful not to dump on people while simultaneously expressing a truth or a feeling if it's necessary, without diluting the intensity of the lyric.

Honestly, I don't try to guess at what most people want. I don't think I'd guess right, and I just think that that's not a good recipe for storytelling. I try to write what I like, what I think my friends would like.

Lena Dunham or Miranda July, those people are sort of thinking about their work in a slightly different way than I do, where their whole body is a seed of what they're creating. I can't imagine watching Miranda's movies with anybody else playing her role, she's so integral. But for me, it feels more like every story is really individual. If I thought of something else, or thought it should be my body representing it, I'd fold my body into it. But most of the time I'm writing to get something out of my body.