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I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.

Amy Tan

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Amy Tan
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: February 19
Essayist
Film Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Oakland
California
Amy Ruth Tan
Writing
Throw
Seven
Second
Novel
Started
Times
Away

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I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.
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A mother is always the beggining. She is how things begin.
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Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.
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I have always known a thing before it happens.
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And now I have to stop. Because every time I remember this, I have to cry a little by myself. I don't know why something that made me so happy then feels so sad now. Maybe that is the way it is with the best memories.
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Fate changes when you change your clothes.
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Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.
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Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden.
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You see what power is holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them.
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Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.
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It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.
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Yesterday my daughter said to me, 'My marriage is falling apart.' And now all she can do is watch it falling.
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Chaos is the penance for leisure.
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Sure I loved him - too much. And he loved me, only not enough. I just want someone who thinks I'm number one in his life. I'm not willing to accept emotional scraps anymore.
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My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.
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I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.
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You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modernink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn.
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My mother would say it is literally ghost writers who come to me.
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Words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them.
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I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.
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