 I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water. |
| You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable. |
| I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private. |
| We are the kind of people who obsess over one word... but we have only one shot to get it right in concert. It was hard the first time I practiced with them. I was so nervous that my vocal chords were paralyzed for about a half-hour. |
| I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success. |
| I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese. |
| I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer. |
| God, life changes faster than you think. |
| Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden. |
| Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone. |
| It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success. |
| It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life. |
| She said 'I'm by commission. You don't have to pay anything until you sell anything.' I said, 'Well fine. You want to be my agent and not make anything.' I thought, 'Boy, is she dumb.' |
| I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic. |
| You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.' Or 'I'll write like this because it will impress that critic.' |
| My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A's from the time I was in kindergarten. |
| I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from. |
| I didn't fear failure. I expected failure. |
| There are a lot of people who think that's what's needed to be successful is always being right, always being careful, always picking the right path. |
| Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses. |
