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

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You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.' Or 'I'll write like this because it will impress that critic.'
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But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better. -Jing-mei
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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.
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My mother would say it is literally ghost writers who come to me.
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When you lose your face..., it is like dropping your necklace down a well. The only way you can get it back is to fall in after it.
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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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You have to be your own person. You can't let people's opinions determine how you think about yourself. There's a difference between identity and self-identity.
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Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.
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To save myself, I destroyed another, and in doing so, I destroyed myself.
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Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
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I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.
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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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With hope, a mind is always free.
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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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For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.
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The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.
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My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.
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I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength...strongest wind cannot be seen.
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You should think about your character. Know where you are changing, how you will be changed, what cannot be changed back again.
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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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