Helen Oyeyemi Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“I love taking things out of context and playing with them and chopping up rules.”

“A few people have tried to make me see that my writing isn't quite their thing by saying to me: 'What about realism?' To which my general response is, 'What about it?' However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, was to say something similar if asked 'What about the fantastic?'”

“I do tend to feel more connected to dead writers, perhaps because they have finished their work.”

“I don't have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.”

“I feel like an old lady; my hero is Miss Marple.”

“I always wanted to be a writer! But I wanted to do other things, too - be a psychologist, a librarian, et cetera. Now I've decided that reading fiction that features characters who are in those professions will do.”

“I don't think my writing has much to do with my age. For me, my biography is more about what I was reading at what age. It's more of an intellectual thing of wanting to be free to write and think without being too bound by categorisation. I don't think I'm made for these times; I feel more like an old-fashioned writer.”

“I have been in love with Emily Dickinson's poetry since I was 13, and, like an anonymous post on findagrave.com says, 'Dear Emily - I hope I have understood.' Emily's poems are sometimes difficult, often abstract, on occasion flippant, but her mind is inside them.”

“I sometimes get asked: 'How come the men in your stories don't have such strong characters?' And I'm like: 'I don't care.' I just want to find out about all the different lives a woman can live. But my feminism has never been against men. It's not erasure; it's just they're not the focus. In real life, they're quite nice.”

“Sometimes I feel weird about time. Sometimes I feel that it doesn't go in the order we perceive it. There are... repetitions that maybe we decide not to notice because it is simpler. I like to pick up on those moments.”