Ayana Mathis quotes:

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.

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.

Now, we struggle, brothers and sisters, and we strive. We have our trials and our tribulations but we are blessed. We go to bed, praise Jesus, and we rise again in the morning. And if that's not a blessing, I don't know what is.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Eudine did not reply. She was indecipherable, so ageless and immaculate. Her eyes were the same caramel shade as her skin. Her face was a placid lake, such depths. A woman with a face like that could be a confessor, could be told anything, no matter how awful, and remain steady as granite.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I think being consistent is really important. In the arts there's a misconception that you sit around waiting for the muse to come, and that it's all really mystical and mysterious. In reality, sometimes you have to fake it till you make it.

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.

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.

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.