Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes
It seems that writing chose me. I feel that because I know history, and I know the history of so many cultures; I have lived a large life.

Quotes to Explore
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I'm profoundly lucky. I really like it. I really like my work. I've liked it since I was 5 years old.
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I think I felt compelled in a way because if I hadn't written the part, I never would have been offered the part. There are at least 10 guys who would have been offered the part before me.
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I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. In the end, I still couldn't play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world's best listener.
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There's not much room for eccentricity in Hollywood, and eccentricity is what's sexy in people.
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I would like to direct.
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I tend to have a pattern of playing misunderstood characters.
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Some of the wives didn't keep up with the program. It started breaking apart during the Apollo days.
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Every village in Africa now has a cyber cafe.
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The spiritual virtue of a sacrament is like light; although it passes among the impure, it is not polluted.
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Our duties and responsibilities as human beings must be shown to be so incontrovertible that even atheists must recognize them. There are ultimate taboos.
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Bob Rubin was opposed to signing the welfare bill. He's not exactly what I call a flaming liberal.
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I went to high school in New York City. So, I grew up in New Jersey my whole life, and I was watching all the people and all the kids that I met there become so jaded.
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An uplifting sense of purpose is more than an impetus for individual accomplishment, it is also a necessary insurance policy against expediency and impropriety.
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The joy is in the getting there. The beginning years of starting your business, the camaraderie when you're in the pit together, are the best years of your life. So rather than being so focused on when you get big and powerful, if you can just get the juice out of that... don't miss it.
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Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.
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I was very close to my mother, and her death, which left a gaping hole in my life, has been very difficult for me and my father in a lot of ways.
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Ain't no place like New Orleans. It's one of kind.
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I'm no Leonardo DiCaprio.
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The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.
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The ramifications that you set for yourself can inspire you to do things that you would have never thought of because, once you're trapped, your job is to persevere.
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I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.
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If you've got talent, stick with it... because talent wins out, without a doubt.
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It seems that writing chose me. I feel that because I know history, and I know the history of so many cultures; I have lived a large life.