“I’m pretty shy and quiet, but writing is a place where I don’t have to be shy or quiet. And as Isaac Bashevis Singer counsels, I seek to both inform and entertain.” “As a black, bisexual woman I am writing into and against a culture that tries to make me and people like me invisible and silent. “A lot of people say you can’t make money from writing. I did not know there was anything beyond that to dream.” I never dared imagine or dream anything beyond that. “To write a good book worthy of publication-that was the dream. “If having a personality and having opinions makes me difficult, then yes, I am very difficult.” Zachary Petit, Design Matters Media Editor-in-Chief To celebrate this live episode of Design Matters, here are 27 Roxane Gay quotes that reveal, bit by bit, her bold and vital voice on the literary and cultural landscapes today. And in a world of mirages online and off, that is an immensely powerful and revolutionary thing. “Otherwise, if I got hired as the person I was pretending to be, I would have to keep up that pretense for the rest of my career.”Ĭontradictions and all, Roxane Gay is herself. When Lifehacker asked her for the best advice she has ever received, she said, simply, it was when she was preparing for a job interview in academia and her friend Matt Seigel advised her to be herself. But one can also find great inspiration in Gay herself. One can find great inspiration in Gay’s prose. … Consider me knocked off that pedestal before you ever try to put me up there.” When they disappoint us, we gleefully knock them from the very pedestal we put them on.
“We have this tendency to put visible feminists on a pedestal. As Gay detailed on the TED stage, yes, she is a feminist-but she dubs herself a bad one for things like her love of catchy rap that’s derogatory to females, or her belief that a woman can take a man’s surname if she wants to. Her profound literary side coexists with her love of the Fast and the Furious franchise, and her prose is often composed as episodes of “Law and Order: SVU” play in the background. But Roxane Gay burns bright with brilliant contradictions.