Ayana Mathis Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• One thing I am learning is to slow down. Multitasking is great, but I when try to do everything at warp speed I just end up with typos and stress.

  Ayana Mathis

  Stress, Trying, Multitasking

  "Twelve Tribes of Hattie Author Ayana Mathis Talks Fiction, Family, and (Sometimes) Faking It". Interview with Meredith Turits, www.glamour.com. December 17, 2012.

  31 Copy quote

• I really, deeply believe in the primacy of character. I believe that my job as a writer is to put a believable human being on a page.

  Ayana Mathis

  Jobs, Believe, Character

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity.

  Ayana Mathis

  Writing, Identity, Aspiration

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• I think that people have some sort of vision that everybody is moving towards perfection, and that there is some sort of set steps or something like that that you can move through to get to that place, and that that's sort of the project of being alive.

  Ayana Mathis

  Moving, Thinking, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• I think that the project of being alive is to be alive. So there will always be twists and turns and steps forward and steps back, but that's just your life. There is no sort of place at which to arrive, and I think that the more one focuses on an end point, the harder it is to get there. It's like the horizon, sort of ever receding, ever receding, ever receding.

  Ayana Mathis

  Thinking, Twists, Horizon

  Source: www.pbs.org

  5 Copy quote

• There is a forgotten black middle class in America - a group which is huge but underrepresented in the media and in art. It's difficult to talk about these things, because it forces one to talk in generalities, but that's my view. I do think the idea of a blanket class for black people is unfortunately still present.

  Ayana Mathis

  Art, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There is still an assumption among many people that to be black is to be lower class. In the last fifteen to twenty years, perhaps even further back than that, there's also been an explosion of a very wealthy black class in the United States, but those people are often treated as special cases: they're athletes, entertainers. Jay-Z. Basketball players. The country metabolizes the fact these rich black people exist, but it seems only to reinforce the idea that every other black person is limping along in poverty.

  Ayana Mathis

  Basketball, Country, Athlete

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think a lot about race and the burdens of representation. There's an idea that because I'm writing a book set around the time of the Great Migration, and happen to be black, I'm trying to write a definitive account of the Great Migration, the so-called "black experience." That's not what I'm doing, and it can be frustrating.

  Ayana Mathis

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• At some point I just acknowledged, at least to myself, that I had a great deal of respect for people of faith. Faith is a strange and wonderful thing. You come up to a kind of wall of unknowing and instead of turning back in despair you leap over it into something else. The Church isn't why I'm a writer, but it's probably a part of it.

  Ayana Mathis

  Wall, People, Despair

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• By sixteen I thought, "Ah, this is all crap, you're all sheep, I'm not going to church, leave me alone." And then at a certain point in my teens I started to go to Catholic churches, by myself. Not because I wanted to be Catholic, but because I wanted to light a candle and say something like a prayer and just sit there. There was something I was missing or trying to reconnect with. But it was a secret at the time. I'd developed this cynical persona and the last thing I wanted to admit was that I was skulking around churches in my spare time.

  Ayana Mathis

  Prayer, Missing, Cynical

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think of my success as a kind of fluke. How else could I possibly think of it? And although it's a banal thing to say, I wrote my book because I was writing my book. At first I didn't know I was writing it, and one of the amazing things that happened as I was putting sentences down on paper is that some of the things that are most sacred and important to me rose to the surface of the prose.

  Ayana Mathis

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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