Chang-rae Lee Quotes
It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.
As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.
So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you are at that moment, accrued all through time, so I accept that.
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.
They're not parallel at all. They're my concerns, but how they're expressed particularly on the page is completely divorced from who I am in my street life.
Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?
Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.
For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.
When I'm describing wartime activities or violence I don't want to be too ornate, to prettify the picture. Once we trace them to the present, the prose becomes denser.
I think their pasts are treated with a voice that sees their role as those of innocents. That's reflected in the past time sequences. They're less "written."
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.
I really try to forget. I only look at my old works if there's an interview and someone asks me about it. Otherwise, it's not even in the rearview mirror.
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.
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.
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.
Like most people, Im fascinated by characters who are completely flawed personalities, riven by anguish and doubt, and are psychologically suspect.
My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled.
To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.
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.
There is secrecy and betrayal but that's more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that's modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.
The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn't want to suggest that the past determines the present.
We can skip through a lot of the stuff people might ask about the writing of the book, and so their comments always start well, well down into the nitty-gritty.
What if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted? And then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit? But you keep coming back for more?
A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.
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.
It’s perhaps more laudable to simply keep heading out into the world, than always tilting to leave one’s mark on it.
Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?
Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?
