Roxane Gay Quotes

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

I've always been at war with myself, for right or wrong.

It's quite hard for people to just accept that they're very contradictory.

I fully embrace myself as a hypocrite.

Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

For an author, the nice characters aren't much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They're doing it for themselves.

Anyone who claims to have an entirely clear conscience is almost certainly a bore.

It's not like you make a decision and everything inside you is 100 percent happy.

She likes herself, yet others hates, For that which in herself she prizes; And while she laughs at them, forgets She is the thing that she despises.

Do I create conflicts for myself? Sure I do.

'Downward Spiral' felt like I had an unending bottomless pit of rage and self-loathing inside me and I had to somehow challenge something or I'd explode. I thought I could get through by putting everything into my music, standing in front of an audience and screaming emotions at them from my guts.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.

An angry man is again angry with himself when he returns to reason.

There is no question you get pumped up by the recognition. Then a self-loathing sets in when you realise you're enjoying it.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

I wouldn't like to see a chick of mine taking her clothes off and kissing a fellow on screen. And my girls must get very hurt when they see me doing it.

Your best friend and worst enemy are both in this room right now. It's not your neighbor right or left - and it's not God or the devil - it's you.

When we're obsessed with someone, it's never about them. It's about us hating ourselves. And that's generally the tone of a lot of my videos, which is this desperate character who's overcompensating with being super happy. But she's broken.

We are sure to be losers when we argue with ourselves; it is a civil war, and in all such contentions, triumphs are defeats.

I think I wear my hypocrisy on my sleeve. I would never say I'm not a complete hypocrite.

I wanted to write a book about people who have the best intentions and think - really, truly think - that they're doing the right thing. And then they realize that when those ideals come knocking at their windowsill, a lot of times they will suddenly disavow those ideals.

The more defensive and angry I get, the more I later discover those feelings are usually just projections of feelings I am having towards myself.

For a long time, I felt that was actually the best I could ever hope for - to pretend to be a good person - because I was quite the opposite.

One of my pleasures is observing people's behavior and pointing out the inconsistencies that we all sort of have at the center of our lives.