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I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

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
Firsts
Aesthetic
First
Crafts
Writing
Private
Thing
Write
Something
Art
Good
Stories
Become
Purely
Wanted
Craft

More quotes by Amy Tan

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Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everyone else want best quality. You thinking different.
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People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.
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My mother had a look on her face that I'll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate.
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In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
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Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.
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We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.
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All objects exist in a moment of time.
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I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect for others, and eventually, thought neither of us knew it at the time, chess games... Come from the South, blow from the wind - poom! - North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.
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Hardships can harden even the best person.
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Over time, passion wanes, differences don't.
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You can have pride in what you do each day, but not arrogance in what you were born with.
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The muse appears at the point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the lanuage is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as thought the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.
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Fate changes when you change your clothes.
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But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people - men, women and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead.
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I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.
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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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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.
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I have always known a thing before it happens.
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Yet part of me also thinks the whole idea makes perfect sense. The three of us, leaving our differences behind, stepping on the plane together, sitting side by side, lifting off, moving West to reach the East.
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Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?
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