Chang-Rae Lee

Novelist

1965-07-29

Quotes by Chang-Rae Lee

• Don't sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

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• But maybe it's the laboring that gives you shape. Might the most fulfilling times be those spent solo at your tasks, literally immersed or not, when you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation that in turn exposes your proclivities and prejudices both?

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• Suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.

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• The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

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• Suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.

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• The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

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• But maybe it's the laboring that gives you shape. Might the most fulfilling times be those spent solo at your tasks, literally immersed or not, when you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation that in turn exposes your proclivities and prejudices both?

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• Don't sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

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• No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.

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• In my teaching, I try to expose my students to the widest range of aesthetic possibilities, so I'll offer them stories from Anton Chekhov to Denis Johnson, from Flannery O'Connor to A.M. Homes, and perhaps investigating all that strange variation of beauty has rubbed off on me. Or perhaps that's why I enjoy teaching literature.

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• I don't like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can't go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises.

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• We arrived the way most emigrant families did. My father came first, and the rest of us - my mother, my sister and me - followed a year later.

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