Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have an interest in the outsider.
After a while, the fear became a habit, too.
I lose pens a lot, so I don't use fancy ones.
Words are an imperfect medium for explaining.
I did a lot of weird jobs, like most writers do.
What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.
Gore isn't required for a good story, but adversity is.
I loved growing up in Shaker Heights, and I really miss it.
My husband's parents were both English teachers for decades.
I have a bad habit of reading more than one book simultaneously!
Before my son was even born, he already had two shelves of books.
Being asked, "Where are you REALLY from?" It makes one feel OTHERED.
Reading feeds writing: it presents you with new ideas to engage with.
I moved to Shaker Heights from Pittsburgh, PA, just before I turned 10.
When reading fiction, we cannot automatically assume that what we read is fact.
For me, any story I tackle begins with the human relationships and not the plot.
There is something about Midwest in general, that has kind of an underdog quality.
I keep a writer's notebook and also put all my daily schedules and to-do lists in it.
I'm very much a people pleaser, and the first book had such a devoted and loving following.
My mother is deeply pragmatic by nature. Perhaps you had to be, as an immigrant. You made do.
I'm ashamed to admit that I very seldom read poetry, even though many of my friends are poets.
One of the things I like so much about 'Goodnight Moon' is the way it leaves room for ambiguity.
You may not be a fan of Twitter-fiction. That's okay. There are novels out there for you - big ones.
I'd like to think of my self as not melancholic at all, I think I'm a pretty cheerful person, really.
No reader wants to sit through the same scene four times in a row, unless they're radically different.
What's the best way to ensure a supply of good books in the future? Support up-and-coming writers now.
My mother ended up getting a Ph.D. of her own, in chemistry, and eventually became a tenured professor.
I'm fascinated by the ways people under repressive regimes still manage to share information - and joy.
Even if Pearl S. Buck hadn't spent most of her life in China, she'd have every right to write about it.
A love of reading shows empathy, the desire to understand how others live or act or might act - and why.
Whenever I travel, I seem to get sick - it's probably inevitable when you're on a plane every single day.
Of course, as a kid, I had no idea what was practical: I wanted to be a paleontologist, then an astronaut.
Somewhere in the Commandments of Reviewing must be written, 'Thou shalt not compare Asians to non-Asians.'
Spend too much time alone with your own words, and your writing grows anemic, in dire need of a transfusion.
I think I'm good at metaphors and descriptions. Plot doesn't come naturally to me, so I work really hard at it.
My parents did give me a lot of books - biographies of Marie Curie - and I did read them, because I was interested.
Taste is idiosyncratic, so I don't love everything people recommend me, and I don't love everything my friends love.
I think one of the reasons that I like fiction versus nonfiction is that I myself can kind of disappear from the story.
When my father finished his Ph.D., my mother went back for another bachelor's degree, this time in environmental science.
I don't think I know a single person who's a minority who hasn't experienced some form of discrimination at one time or another.
I would never tell myself, you have to write 20 pages today or something. But I do try to show up. Read what I wrote, fix things.
Debut novels are difficult because nobody knows you... they just don't find a huge audience, because that's how the market works.
Now that I have a child of my own, I'm in awe of - and deeply grateful for - the time my parents spent in taking me to bookstores.
Comparing Asian writers mainly to other Asian writers implies that we're all telling the same story - a disappointingly reductive view.
If you see harassment happening, speak up. Being harassed is terrible; having bystanders pretend they don't notice is infinitely worse.
You don't feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.
What I remember about race relations in the 1990s is that you showed your awareness by saying you didn't see race, that you were colour-blind.
I wrote 'Little Fires Everywhere' and sold the book in 2015, still the Obama years. The possibility of a Trump presidency was not on my radar.
The first bookstore I loved wasn't a little independent gem nestled in a neighborhood: it was a modest Waldenbooks in our local shopping mall.
Short of the dishonest, the illegal, and the cruel, there's only one thing my son could do that would really disappoint me: not liking reading.