Top 30 Helen Oyeyemi Quotes

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

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

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.

I don’t have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

So many times I’ve encountered people who are just kind of like, ‘Yeah, Nigeria,’ and, you know, thump their chest and seem very sure of, like, being Nigerian. And I’m just kind of, like, I wish I could be that sure.

I was a real mess at school. I got a bit of a reputation for being the weird girl: the girl who’d go silent randomly and just kind of write down replies to people’s questions in a book.

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 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.’

I think, basically, what I’m good for is reading – a lot. I think I’ll always be more of a reader than a writer, definitely. There are sooo many books in the world I haven’t read, sometimes I feel as if they’re all piled on top of my head weighing me down and saying, ‘Hurry up.’

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

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.

I do love Shirley Jackson, but I don’t deserve to be named in connection with her. I remember reading ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ and having goosebumps for hours. The way she builds narrative pressure in that book is just amazing. I think you could reread it a few times and actually go out of your mind.

I don’t think anything can help me socially, to be honest: I have this terrible personality. I don’t really know how to describe it… maybe I’ll go with surly.

The way that people feel changes everything. Feelings are forces. They cause us to time travel. And to leave ourselves, to leave our bodies. I would be that kind of psychologist who says, ‘You’re absolutely right – there are monsters under the bed.’

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

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 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.

The way ‘The Icarus Girl’ came about was by me just basically bragging it with a literary agent and telling him I’d written 150 pages when I’d only written 20. And I think it was when the agent e-mailed me back right the very next day after sending him the 20 pages and asking to see the other 130.

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

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.

Years ago a friend and fellow writer, Nick Antosca, once made a remark about it being best not to threaten, but to simply act. An effective way of going about things, I think.

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

I remember that I used to get lots of books from the library, and ‘Little Women’ was one of them. And I used to just cross out the parts of it that really upset me because it’s such a sad book in so many ways. I’d cross out the parts that upset me, and I would rewrite new endings.

I can recommend wearing blue mascara whilst writing. I’m telling you, it really adds something.

Fairy tales, because they have a very clear structure, are easier to interfere with. Also they have this really weird logic: the kind of logic that you only really experience when you’re not feeling very well, or as a child.

Home is where your teapots are.

I tend to prioritize emotional realism above the known laws of time and space, and when you do that, it’s inevitable that strange things happen. Which can be quite enjoyable, I think.

Dickinson is my hero because she was a joker, because she would never explain, because as a poet she confronted pain, dread and death, and because she was capable of speaking of those matters with both levity and seriousness. She’s my hero because she was a metaphysical adventurer.