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I couldn't write about love without writing about hate - specifically, how the experience of hatred embeds itself in the body and prevents love from entering or leaving.

Vivek Shraya

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Vivek Shraya
Without
Entering
Writing
Leaving
Love
Hatred
Couldn
Hate
Experience
Write
Prevents
Body
Specifically

More quotes by Vivek Shraya

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I tend to focus less on genre as a starting point and more on idea or intention and let the idea dictate genre.
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I don't yet know what style will be required for my next novel, but my sense is that each book will involve a new relationship to language.
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When I do book readings, I always incorporate music or singing.
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I recently did a reading at an elementary school in Ottawa, and one of the children asked me if I was a girl. I said yes. Another child commented that I had a deep voice. I responded: Can girls have deep voices? There was a pause and then the group responded, Yes!
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In my thirties, I have felt a greater urgency to make art that highlights what it feels like to be racialized, likely due to living in a country that obscures our racism with the idea of multiculturalism.
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As a general rule, I tend to collaborate with artists whose work I admire.
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My art career often feels less like an art career and more like a career in educating, usually by using my body.
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Despite the fact that I'm not highly skilled in any visual art, aesthetics have always played a strong role in my art, including my first albums.
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In poetry, I didn't have to provide resolution. I could ask hard questions without feeling responsible for the answers.
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Now is not the time for Canadians to be sanctimonious. It is time for us to be prudent and active.
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When I wouldn't leave home without my blue contacts or when I was bleaching my hair, I didn't have the language to articulate that I was trying to assimilate to whiteness. If anything, I was trying to look normal.
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Art can sometimes be separate from the artist.
Vivek Shraya
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As a brown artist, I have mixed feelings about my relationship to art and my responsibilities post-Trump.
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Children are receptive to talking about gender creativity, confirming the importance of the book as a means to instigate this dialogue at an early age.
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Of course, I can't separate my queerness from my brownness - if anything, my queerness amplifies my brownness, and vice versa - but I spent so much of my early twenties trying to erase my differences, often without awareness of what I was doing.
Vivek Shraya
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I worry about what Trump will inspire in Canada, especially given incidents that have already occurred here since the election.
Vivek Shraya
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I have been and continue to be committed to art as a tool to ignite, comfort, and discomfort.
Vivek Shraya
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I am more likely to get paid for my art if it's presented alongside a white artist, so the questions around value and agency arise: What choices should I make, or do I have to make, if I want to be compensated for my work? Why isn't my art valued on its own?
Vivek Shraya
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It's exciting to consider how art, in its ability to reveal, can be ahead of the artist.
Vivek Shraya
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If anything, I have witnessed the ways my art travels, or is rendered more accessible, when sanctioned by or connected to white artists.
Vivek Shraya