Amy Tan
Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.Collection: Power
Our uniqueness makes us special, makes perception valuable - but it can also make us lonely. This loneliness is different from being 'alone': You can be lonely even surrounded by people. The feeling I'm talking about stems from the sense that we can never fully share the truth of who we are. I experienced this acutely at an early age.Collection: Alone
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.Collection: Imagination
My older brother and I read all the time. My father read, but only things related to religion. One year, he did read a set of stories that was called something like '365 Stories' out loud to us. They followed a family for the year, a page a day. They were about kids with simple problems - like a wheel coming off their bicycle.Collection: Religion
I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.Collection: Failure
No one can travel your own road for you; you must travel it for yourself. My faith in this stems from my childhood. I grew up in a family with a system of religious beliefs handed down to me.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Failure
I'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.Collection: Knowledge
Until the age of five, my parents spoke to me in Chinese or a combination of Chinese and English, but they didn't force me to speak Mandarin. In retrospect, this was sad, because they believed that my chance of doing well in America hinged on my fluency in English. Later, as an adult, I wanted to learn Chinese.Collection: Sad
I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.Collection: Freedom
For books I want to keep reading, it's definitely the voice. It must be a voice I've never heard before, and it must have its own particular intelligence. By 'voice,' I don't mean vernacular. It has to have its own particular history and world that it inhabits.Collection: Intelligence
Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.Collection: Poetry
It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.Collection: Success
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.Collection: Respect
That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do.
Chinese artists have been subversive over thousands of years, taking what they think of the government and embedding it in their art. There might be censorship of not going as far as they might.
I'm usually woken by a vibration on my up-band. It's the gradual vibration for about ten seconds, and then the chimes of my blue light. It's just a way to wake gently. It all gently puts me into awake-mode. I play music off of my Sonos playlist. 'The Rachmaninoff Concerto 3 in D-minor', 1st movement.
People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.
I read academic books on courtesan culture at the turn-of-the century in Shanghai such as Gail Hershatter's 'The Gender of Memory'. The diaries were mostly in the form of letters from courtesans to a lover who had disappeared or taken their savings.
I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
Popularity is given to you, and if you think that just because you're really popular you're a better person, it could be a real crash when you find the popularity goes down.
My mother always thought if her mother hadn't left her, she would have been happy. All the problems she had never would have happened.
My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.
I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.
That's part of the character of Shanghainese people. They're good negotiators, they're very persistent, and you grow up in an atmosphere like that - very competitive. That becomes part of your personality: Shanghai personality becomes part of yours. Just like New Yorkers - they're often like that.
For many courtesans, it was over by age 22.
My mother's openness has remained inspiring to me. I strive to be a skeptic, in the best sense of that word: I question everything, and yet I'm open to everything. And I don't have immovable beliefs. My values shift and grow with my experiences - and as my context changes, so does what I believe.
I don't steer clear of genres. I simply haven't steered myself toward some of them.
My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.
I recognise why I have such a strong inability to forgive certain people who betray me. It's chiselled in, like a name on a tomb stone.
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.
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 measured my success by how many clients I had and how many billable hours I had.
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.
I would never require anyone to read any book. That seems antithetical to why we read - which is to choose a book for our personal reasons. I always shudder when I'm told my books are on required reading lists.
My mother believed in curses, karma, good luck, bad luck, feng shui. Her amorphous set of beliefs showed me you can pick and choose the qualities of your philosophy, based on what works for you.
There is this myth, that America is a melting pot, but what happens in assimilation is that we end up deliberately choosing the American things - hot dogs and apple pie - and ignoring the Chinese offerings.
In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
Mothers have this huge influence, and I feel like they're always teaching us from the day we're born what to be afraid of, what to be cautious of, what we should like, and what we should look like.
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.
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.
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.
My breakfast is usually a wholegrain cereal or porridge, with walnuts sprinkled in it, berries, a tablespoon of honey, and chia seeds. I have coffee and a little cherry juice with seltzer. I have a seat by the window, and I look out at the view.
I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.
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 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.
I have many reasons why I think reading is really important. It provided for me a refuge, especially during difficult times. It provided me with the notion that I could find an ending that was different from what was happening to me at the time.
My writing often contains souvenirs of the day - a song I heard, a bird I saw - which I then put into the novel.
I am an American, steeped in American values. But I know on an emotional level what it means to be of the Chinese culture.