In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

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.

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.

It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

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.

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.

I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.

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 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.

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.

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.'

My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A's from the time I was in kindergarten.

Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

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.

It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.

I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.

The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.

I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

God, life changes faster than you think.

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.

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 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 read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

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 learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.

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.

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.

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.

At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing about emotional confusion with my mother related to our different beliefs. Hers was based in family history, which I didn't know anything about. I always felt hesitant in talking about Chinese culture and American culture.

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.

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.

For many courtesans, it was over by age 22.

I am an American, steeped in American values. But I know on an emotional level what it means to be of the Chinese culture.

I don't steer clear of genres. I simply haven't steered myself toward some of them.

I felt ashamed of being different and ashamed of feeling that way.

I grew up with Bible stories, which are like fairy tales, because my father was a minister. We heard verses and prayers every day. I liked the gorier Bible stories. I did have a book of Chinese fairy tales. All the people except the elders looked like Italians. But we were not a family that had fiction books.

I have survivor skills. Some of that is superficial - what I present to people outwardly - but what makes people resilient is the ability to find humour and irony in situations that would otherwise overpower you.

I like to go somewhere where I learn something I didn't know before, like the Dry Tortugas between Florida and Cuba.

I measured my success by how many clients I had and how many billable hours I had.