Chang-Rae Lee Quotes
All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference. Technically, I do enjoy the flashback! But not just for informational material.
Quotes to Explore
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I've made up little mantras for myself, catchphrases from a screenwriting book that doesn't exist. One is 'Write the movie you'd pay to go see.' Another is 'Never let a character tell me something that the camera can show me.'
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If you get labeled a winner, people come along for the ride. Might as well enjoy it and they should too.
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I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.
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For me, the whole process involves envisioning this book in my head as I'm working.
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We did a play of 'Frog and Toad' at my elementary school. And I'm not sure if this is part of the book or it was something that we made up on our own, but I auditioned to play the black hole, which somehow makes sense to me.
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I've always been obsessed with style and glamor and if I want anyone to get anything out of my book, it's how we can all have them in our lives.
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When you take the world record, a lot of people are going to go out there to get you, really. I kind of enjoy that. I like being chased.
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A book tour is not a good opportunity to let your mind wander. You have to pay attention, remember salespeople's and interviewers' names, succinctly summarize your book in a 'selling' way, and so on.
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I'm thrilled I can make a living doing something I enjoy.
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A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative. That's what I want as a reader - I want to be confident that the book will do its job.
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For me, the food I like to make is the food I can enjoy all the time anytime. It's not too calculated or technical.
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And rather than make the book unwieldy I have eschewed notes-reluctantly when some obscure passage or allusion seemed to ask for a timely word; with more equanimity when the temptation was to criticize or 'appreciate.' For the function of the anthologist includes criticizing in silence.
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Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.
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I don't have the time to curl up on my couch with a good book.
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Maybe I would have become an actor. I was a very outgoing kid, but being in the hospital - being outside of social action for so long - turned me into an observer. Actually, right after I got out of the hospital, I did start writing a novel, but the book was so transparently about me that I stopped.
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You're too busy writing the next book to worry about Googling yourself all the time.
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Once I found this possibility to use Twitter and Facebook and my blog to connect to my readers, I'm going to use it, to connect to them and to share thoughts that I cannot use in the book.
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I remember, even in college, reading Cliffs Notes about a book and thinking to myself, 'Geez, that sounds like a good book. I should probably read it.'
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I can't tell you about acting. You can develop all the skills, voice, gesture, movement, you can develop by exercise and practice but finally fundamentally it's mining from yourself, from your own personality, from what you know. If you can't know it you can have a good guess by people you know or books you've read.
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I spent most of high school working on the debate team, probably at some expense to my grades. Being a member of the team was great training in critical analysis, organization, and logic.
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My parents lost everything, all their savings, because we had to run from the Nigerian side to the Biafran side. We were Igbos.
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There is a driving force more powerful than steam, electricity and nuclear power: the will.
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All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference. Technically, I do enjoy the flashback! But not just for informational material.
