Helen Oyeyemi Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“I've always felt happy in my own company. It's only when I get around other people that things get sticky.”

“I don't despise 'Don Quixote,' but it is a book I don't... get. I'll have to come back it. Maybe there'll be a gateway story that opens it up for me; that happened for me with 'Paradise Lost' and the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy.”

“I don't feel there's a difference between the real world and the fairy-tale world. They contain psychological truths and, I guess, projections of what the culture that tells them thinks about various things: men, women, aging, dying - the most basic aspects of being human.”

“The first book I really loved was 'Little Women' - I'd have given anything for Beth to have been allowed to live; I remember crying very much over her death, trying to make the words change just by staring at them. I loved 'Anne of Green Gables,' too; 'What Katy Did;' and 'Peter Pan.'”

“Authors I've longed to write like - but realize I actually can't even begin to - include Poe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Daniil Kharms, Witold Gombrowicz, Emily Dickinson, Robert Walser, Barbara Comyns, Ntozake Shange, Camille Laurens, Zbigniew Herbert, and Jose Saramago.”

“The more forcibly I'm made aware of the fact that I'll never be the kind of storyteller I most admire, the less I'll be troubled by that. I'll probably just become more myself.”

“The way I live now is that I only write, which means that I'm very poor but very happy. Everything in my life is the way I want it to be.”

“I take aliens very seriously and don't appreciate light entertainment or weak approximations being made of them.”

“In my family, telling stories is just a way of life.”

“I love character and voice, and my favourite books have been the ones in which I've become completely absorbed.”