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I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

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
Life
Write
Aliens
Thought
Jazz
Also
Lessons
Firsts
Tried
First
Completely
Take
Fiction
Writing
Playing
Things
Making
Alien

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You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.
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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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No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.
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I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.
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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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I felt foolish and tired, as if I had been running to escape someone chasing me, only to look behind to discover there was no one there.
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You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying. -An-mei
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With each passing day, I didn't lose hope. I fought to have more.
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So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.
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Then she told me why a tiger is gold and black. It has two ways. The gold side leaps with its fierce heart. The black side stands still with cunning, hiding its gold between the trees, seeing and not being seen, waiting patiently for things to come. I did not learn to use my black side until after the bad man left me.
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I thought this man had long ago drained everything from my heart. But now something strong and bitter flowed and made me feel another emptiness in a place I didn't know was there. I cursed this man aloud so he could hear. You had dog eyes. You jumped and followed whoever called you. Now you chase your own tail.
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If you are greedy, what is inside you is what makes you always hungry.
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I have survivor skills. Some of that is superficial - what I present to people outwardly - but what makes people resilient is the ability to find humour and irony in situations that would otherwise overpower you.
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After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?
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It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
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I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer.
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I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.
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I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the sou. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true....If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.
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My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.
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That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
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