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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Black people were very angry with me for writing the book. A lot of people didn't believe me, or didn't want to believe me, and that used to really bother me. It was a very painful and difficult time.
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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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It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.
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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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'The Good Soldier' is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.
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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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A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.
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Personally, I don't want to do a lot of angel deals in a year. I get approached a lot. I'm becoming less and less polite, which doesn't seem to be helping. A lot of the things I get pitched on are from people who just want to make money.
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It's so bad being homeless in winter. They should go somewhere warm like the Caribbean where they can eat fresh fish all day.
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We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.
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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.
