Chang-rae Lee quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Chang-rae Lee

Chang-rae Lee Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Chang-rae Lee on Wise Famous Quotes.

My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled.

And too intense a longing, everyone knows, can lead to poor decisions, rash actions, hopes that become outsized and in turn deform reality

Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?

The question, then, is whether being an "individual" makes a difference anymore. That it can matter at all. And if not, whether we in fact care.

Behold a fire from the opposite shore.

He admired Fan for being Fan, which is to say the kind of person who would keep the right perspective on such qualified information).

I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.

It seems I have always been fortunate to be in a certain provident, which must be my sole skill, and worth, and luck. [p. 138]

Indelible, our last clues to a beautiful woman

Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.

We reshape the story even when we believe we are simply repeating it.

We forget that every fervor will subside.

It's in the tilting and thrashing that we wangle our luck.

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war.

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

Before I start my work in the morning, I need to have quickly browsed the entire paper, noting articles that I want to read during lunch.

Don't sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

He said you could tell about a person not from what he believed, but by what worried him.

The most wretched of sights, the just-crushed spirit.

I think that's great - I just try not to be one of those people. I find the more I think about it, the less free I feel when I write and when I work.

THE JOURNEY WAS NEARLY OVER. The

For me, that's always been one of the great charms of the first person: we gain access to a very personal, private kind of music.

To be honest, I'm not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.

In America, he said, it's even hard to stay Korean.

The constant cry is that you belong here, or you make yourself belong, or you must go. (1998: 319)

I suppose people might consider me a 'loose' reader, as I seem willing to read anything of quality thinking and prose.

It's not that I don't enjoy other people, but what I find with writers is this back and forth. And also, there's no need to talk about work.

We arrived the way most emigrant families did. My father came first, and the rest of us - my mother, my sister and me - followed a year later.

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.

Like most people, I'm fascinated by characters who are completely flawed personalities, riven by anguish and doubt, and are psychologically suspect.

Suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.

In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.

Our tainted world looms within us, every one.

It's perhaps more laudable simply to keep heading out into the world than always tilting to leave one's mark on it.

Most people don't think about race as much as I do. They don't have to.

No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.

I'm not the sort of writer who can plan out things. Mostly I have no idea where I'm going.

I'm a B+ student of life.

Whether the people are happy or not in their lives, they have learned to keep steadily moving, moving all the time.

One of the ready advantages of writing a road or quest story is that it mirrors the experience of writing a novel.

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.

I often think that the prime directive for me as a teacher of writing is akin to that for a physician, which is this: do no harm.

I think book clubs should read more contemporary poetry.

I think my parents recognised that I'd always wanted to be a writer, and so they didn't think that this was some idle, faddish wish on my part.

In every betrayal dwells a self-betrayal.

All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference. Technically, I do enjoy the flashback! But not just for informational material.