Roxane Gay

“Family is powerful, no matter what. We’re always tied together with our eyes and our lips and our blood and our bloody…

— Roxane Gay

“On my more difficult days, I’m not sure what’s more of a pain in my ass—being black or being a woman. I’m…

— Roxane Gay

“What a Crazy Woman Thinks About While Walking Down the Street She tries to walk not too fast and not too slow.…

— Roxane Gay

“I often tell my students that fiction is about desire in one way or another. The older I get, the more I…

— Roxane Gay

“How could I forget? We had a blast but we were surrounded by misery. That is hard to take. I’m just being…

— Roxane Gay

“These oldest pictures have been in the album so long that they are stuck to the pages. To try and remove the…

— Roxane Gay

“I was marked after that. Men could smell it on me, that I had lost my body, that they could avail themselves…

— Roxane Gay

Florida is a strange place: hot, beautiful, ugly. I love it here, and how nothing makes sense but still, somehow, there is…

— Roxane Gay

I write for myself, first and foremost and I also write for people, mostly women, who just want to be seen and…

— Roxane Gay

I am 39. I am single. I am a black woman. I have too many advanced degrees. Many a news story tells…

— Roxane Gay

When I was a child, my parents took my brothers and me to Port-au-Prince during the summer so we could get to…

— Roxane Gay

I am failing as a woman. I am failing as a feminist. To freely accept the feminist label would not be fair…

— Roxane Gay

“People like you always choose to absolve yourselves. You are complicit even if you do not actively contribute to the problem because…

— Roxane Gay

“I am not promiscuous with my warmth, but when I share it, my warmth can be as hot as the sun.”

— Roxane Gay

“My brother tried to sag his jeans until a stranger in the airport grabbed him by the ears and hitched his pants…

— Roxane Gay

“My true loves were and still are books and writing stories and daydreaming. Sports were merely a distraction keeping me from what…

— Roxane Gay

“Narratives about certain experiences are somehow legitimized when mediated through a man’s perspective. Consider the work of John Updike or Richard Yates.…

— Roxane Gay

“To be fair, I hate the N-word and avoid using it because the N-word has always been a pejorative, a word designed…

— Roxane Gay

If people cannot be flawed in fiction there's no place left for us to be human.

— Roxane Gay

I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem.

— Roxane Gay

“We tend to believe that accusations of privilege imply we have it easy, which we resent because life is hard for nearly…

— Roxane Gay

“When it’s hot, I sweat profusely, mostly from my head, and then I feel self-conscious and find myself constantly wiping the sweat…

— Roxane Gay

My fiction is a very accurate reflection of the world we live in. Certainly, in some stories, that reflection is amplified but…

— Roxane Gay

Something outrageous, in the truest sense of the word, is always happening. On social networks, we're always voicing our reactions to these…

— Roxane Gay

I read too many romance novels during my formative years. I have a penchant for romantic comedies. I understand why 'Romeo and…

— Roxane Gay