Ayana Mathis Quotes

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.

I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days, I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.

I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.

Half of what's wrong with people today is that they ain't got no place to go that makes them peaceful.

One of the things that writers worry about is finding a voice. I don't think it's a thing that you find so much as it is something that comes to you, or that presents itself.

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way.

Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.

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.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem.

The critics and the reviewers are more frightening than anything else!

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.

There's a stereotype that to be a strong black woman is to be strong about being black.

My book has a pre - civil rights setting with a post - civil rights sensibility. I believe less and less that there is something called "The Black Experience," though undoubtedly there was one once.

At home they thought of white people as a vague but powerful entity--like the forces that control the weather, that capable of destruction, that hidden from view.