Alexander Chee Quotes
I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.
Quotes to Explore
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It's hard to generalize, because they're all different. When I started, I decided to take as much advantage as I could of the freedom offered by the SF field.
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My parents were divorced and I would spend weekends with my father.
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It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.
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It's too bad I'm not a flirt. When I'm on the sets, I'm too busy working on my scenes to look at the ladies.
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Thankfully I'm not endlessly ambitious, but I have done some crazy ambitious things like buying an island off the west coast of Scotland in the late Sixties.
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Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.
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I try genuinely, when I'm playing a character, to not judge them and just to inhabit someone as how one sees them. That being said, you also want to make sure that you don't blur the edges of people too much because humans are naughty and complicated beings.
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I know from personal experience that engaging with your community and helping others helps foster a sense of shared sacrifice and - at a time when our politics seem more focused on tearing us apart than bringing us together - that shared sacrifice will help us rekindle the national unity that has made us the strongest nation in the world.
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You know in my own area of Waltham Forest, we've had many murders as a result of the gang violence and often innocent bystanders get caught up in it.
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My parents didn't have any money.
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I rarely repeat playing the same role in a show. I figured I'd plumbed 90 percent the first time around, so let's move on to something where I'm starting from scratch.
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Since Queens is the most ethnically diverse plot of land on Earth, we had tenants from all over the globe. The whole world in one building.
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There are a lot of people who would laugh at the idea of me being a good singer.
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At the heart of every faith system is a bargain: on one side there is the comfort that comes from a narrative that suggests human life has cosmic significance, and on the other a duty to yield to moral commands that can, in the moment, seem rather inconvenient.
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People, including me, can get so detached from everything, but when you can focus on a defined place, a home, it gets you back in touch.
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If I have one thing on in a week, I find it very difficult to get back to work that week. I need a lot of dreaming time.
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The biggest mistake people make in life is not trying to make a living at doing what they most enjoy.
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Why did she have to wake up this morning? Or ever! But especially this morning. Her stare took on a glint of panic. Then she thought: Oh! This is my wedding day!
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You try to shut the criticism out, but it's pretty hard to do. You see people on the street, friends, people that you know are in your corner, and they come and tell you how bad they feel, and that's not the kind of conversation you want. I don't want anyone to feel bad for me.
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There is survival behavior, and doctors need to learn from patients who do not die when they are supposed to, instead of saying, 'You're doing very well, so keep doing whatever you are doing.' They should be asking what their patient is doing and pass the information to other patients.
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When I was in Thailand, I went into the up-country because Marco Polo didn't get down into the flesh pots of Bangkok because they didn't exist in those days.
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Public officials insult our intelligence and our goodwill when they paint rosy pictures about budgets, jobs, bipartisanship, and transparency, and alter their positions on issues simply to keep collecting their paycheck by never disagreeing or disappointing anyone.
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I know one thing - very few writers in Southern California get to write what they want to write. We are more or less worker ants, working for either film companies or tv companies or Internet companies. We do a lot of assigned work. Feelings hardly ever enter into it. If they do, they tend to be on a sort of soap opera level.
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I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.
