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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A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
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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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I am a passionate admire of Sappho, but that has to be one of the stupidest sentences I have ever seen in a scholarly book.
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Dedication: To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.
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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 peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God. (City of God, Book 19)
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Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass. It is terribly simple.
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It surprised me, the feeling I got when I won the Oscar for 'Scent of a Woman.' It was a new feeling. I'd never felt it. I don't see my Oscar much now. But when I first got it, there was a feeling for weeks afterward that I guess is akin to winning a gold medal in the Olympics.
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The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.
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I'm pretty low-key and try to do fun things.
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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.
