Top 30 Chang-Rae Lee Quotes

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

I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.

My writing day follows my family‘s day. I get a good few hours in the mornings when the kids are out of the house. And I don’t work at night any more. I like to see my family.

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.

What’s fun about a dystopian novel is that we can enjoy and be entertained. But that world is only slightly different, right? It’s familiar enough to be recognizable, and skewed enough to give us pause.

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

I’m interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate – with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe, I don’t like proper dress while working. I like writing in pajama-like clothing, which eases and relaxes me and allows me to connect with the decidedly improper.

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

A novel, even a social realist one, can’t simply be a comprehensive rendering of what is. A novel requires a special angle or approach, whether in structure or language or theme, to justify itself.

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

Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what’s going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it’s this rash leap.

We grow up with this idea that we’re all individual agents. We work, make our money, have our place to live and our satellite TV. But whether you like it or not, you need family or community.

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.

I write on a computer. On breaks, I’ll make myself green tea. I don’t want something too caffeinated. I guess I don’t believe in chemical enhancement of my writing. Just slight, but nothing crazy.

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

My parents – my mother, particularly – were very focused on our succeeding. I loved my parents, and was very grateful to them for everything, and I didn’t want to disappoint them.

In my other books, things do happen, but they are kind of bookends to the real action, which for me was an exploration of consciousness. Not that I don’t get into the consciousness of the people in ‘The Surrendered,’ but you could say there’s not as much anxiety about it.

We read and remember certain writers because they offer distinctive voices and perspectives, because they’ve given themselves over completely and passionately to their obsessions while vigorously ignoring everything else.

I remember when I was in art classes, I hated following the assignments. And I would get in trouble for doing something totally different or taking it in a weird direction.

I don’t listen to music while writing; it seems to me I’m trying to make my own kind of music, and to have anything else going on is just noisy interference.

I don’t like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can’t go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises.

Even though I went to Exeter and Yale, and I enjoyed all the trappings of those places, I think at the same time – and maybe it’s because I’m an immigrant kid and not white – there was always this other consciousness; that is, I was conscious of everything that was going on.

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.

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

I didn’t leave Wall Street because the work was against my nature – I do have a pretty good head for numbers. I left because I had this love for writing.

I can put together a pretty decent meal from whatever happens to be in the refrigerator and the pantry. I like the challenge of this sort of improvisation, the rigor of limitation and sometimes having to take a risk.

We know the point of the 2010 Census is to count us, one by one, to tally every last resident, but the massive project of course has more prying, if limited, interests.

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.

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