Quotes by Helen Oyeyemi

About Helen Oyeyemi:

Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi is a British novelist. In 2013 she was included in the Granta Best Of Young British Novelists list.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

Helen Oyeyemi

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 er...

Helen Oyeyemi

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

Helen Oyeyemi

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

Helen Oyeyemi

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

Helen Oyeyemi

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

Helen Oyeyemi

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

Helen Oyeyemi

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 R...

Helen Oyeyemi

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 H...

Helen Oyeyemi

I'm greedy about cities - I like to form my impressions of them on my own, and on foot as far as possible, looking and listening, having conversations with bridges and streets and riverbanks, conversations I tend not to be aware of until a little lat...

Helen Oyeyemi

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.

Helen Oyeyemi

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.

Helen Oyeyemi

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 h...

Helen Oyeyemi

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.

Helen Oyeyemi

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

Helen Oyeyemi

I think I started writing about identity, and I used to believe that identity is the story. But now I'm not so much subscribed to that. I mean, with 'Mr. Fox,' it has a feminist agenda as well. And so, as I sort of been away from writing about identi...

Helen Oyeyemi

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.

Helen Oyeyemi

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

Helen Oyeyemi

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.

Helen Oyeyemi

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.

Helen Oyeyemi

Jess couldn't stop spitting out words, because they were words like blades to hurt, and if she swallowed them, she'd be scraped hollow.

Helen Oyeyemi

Author Bio

  • NameHelen Oyeyemi
  • DescriptionBritish author
  • BornDecember 10, 1984
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWoman Of Letters