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I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

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
People
Write
Didn
Thought
Originality
Wells
Clever
Well
Realize
Enough
Realizing
Writing
Called
Something
Voice

More quotes by Amy Tan

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I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations.
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Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.
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What is a secret wish? It is what you want but cannot ask.
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It means we're looking one way, while following another. We're for one side and also the other. We mean what we say, but our intentions are different.
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Chaos is the penance for leisure.
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I have always known a thing before it happens.
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Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
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A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really, he's just another bird drinking from your misery.
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Dementia was like a truth serum.
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We are the kind of people who obsess over one word... but we have only one shot to get it right in concert. It was hard the first time I practiced with them. I was so nervous that my vocal chords were paralyzed for about a half-hour.
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In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
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From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.
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We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.
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All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. -Ying Ying
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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 would say it is literally ghost writers who come to me.
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In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.
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There's no hope. There's no reason to keep trying. Because you must. This is not hope. Not reason. This is your fate. This is your life, what you must do.
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My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.
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I don't steer clear of genres. I simply haven't steered myself toward some of them.
Amy Tan