Mat Johnson Quotes

#1. In my head, I was getting 'gangsta,' which I've always felt showed greater intent than getting 'gangster' in that it expresses a willful unlawfulness even upon its own linguistic representation.

Mat Johnson

#2. And that's the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people's actions are affecting the lives of black people.* In

Mat Johnson

#3. People look at interracial couples through their own, distorting racial lens. It doesn't matter what form they take.

Mat Johnson

#4. Every misogynist came out of a woman.

Mat Johnson

#5. Forgiveness comes later in life, after you've created enough disasters of your own.

Mat Johnson

#6. I look white to a lot of people. And I'm not. I'm African-American. I'm mixed. I like to call myself Mulatto because that definition fits. So, you know, I've dealt with the conflict my whole life between how I look and my actual ethnic and racial identity.

Mat Johnson

#7. The sociopaths - that's the real problem. The whole street demeanor is about pretending to be a sociopath as well so that the real ones can't find you.

Mat Johnson

#8. I was a boy that age once, and I know that 97.7 percent of their bodies are semen and the 2.8 percent is an incendiary device for spraying it.

Mat Johnson

#9. A man's daughter is his heart. Just with feet, walking out in the world.

Mat Johnson

#10. For some reason, people always assign high cheekbones to some ethnicity, but apparently by their regards, everybody on earth has high cheekbones. So I don't know if that matters.

Mat Johnson

#11. It is a great moment in every freak's life when he or she finds out that at least they are not the only one.

Mat Johnson

#12. Long-haul trucking. Just roaming the country, alone, with audiobooks and podcasts, sleeping in the back of the cab, showering at gas stations at 4 a.m., minimal human contact. That's living the dream.

Mat Johnson

#13. I'm watching you, big boy, my eyes say, but his are closed so it's an optical monologue.

Mat Johnson

#14. My weak suit is whatever each reader hates about each book.

Mat Johnson

#15. I love the idea of biracial. I actually don't use the word biracial. I tend to use mixed. Biracial to me accentuates the word race, and, you know, I don't really care for it.

Mat Johnson

#16. My strong suit is that I've been willing to risk on the page to get somewhere interesting.

Mat Johnson

#17. Curing America's racial pathology couldn't be done with good intentions or presidential elections.

Mat Johnson

#18. People aren't social. They're tribal. Race doesn't exist, but tribes are real.

Mat Johnson

#19. I was participating in something horrible, and my only defense is that I was motivated by my own fear, which of course is no defense at all.

Mat Johnson

#20. she loves everyone else here enough that she is willing to let them see all of who she is in this moment.

Mat Johnson

#21. I've been writing forever, 20 years.

Mat Johnson

#22. Some people age, and some just dehydrate.

Mat Johnson

#23. The people, they need someone to live through. Trust me, I used to be in roller derby back in the day. People need a hero.

Mat Johnson

#24. Here I was, on the cusp of my own great dream, my own impossible truth, and this gluttonous man was crowding it with his improbable vision. There wasn't enough magic in the universe for both of us. Worse, Garth's mad theory put mine in an altogether new light. Was I as crazy as his fat ass?

Mat Johnson

#25. Everybody just gets on my nerves after like, 10 minutes, you know.

Mat Johnson

#26. The fear comes back but I don't listen to it. I decide the fear itself is nothing of merit, a few little chemicals in my brain, dripping the wrong way. I walk right over and if I must I will walk right through.

Mat Johnson

#27. I'm really suspicious of anybody who comes in and says, this is your identity now, or this is your belief system, and now that you have this, everything's going to be great.

Mat Johnson

#28. You've got to admit, slick, you got a skill for avoiding the devil."

"That just means that now the devils out there, looking for me...and that devil is very mad.

Mat Johnson

#29. I start with fear. It comes in so many forms. When I write, some of the fear goes away. So I write into the fear, and even more dissipates. I want to be scared while writing. I want to bring it to the surface so I can banish it.

Mat Johnson

#30. Even drunk, I knew any escape plan that involved going to Detroit, Michigan, was a harbinger of doom.

Mat Johnson

#31. I have found that, in the African American oral tradition, if the words are enunciated eloquently enough, no one examines the meaning for definitive truth.

Mat Johnson