Quote

For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

Chang-Rae Lee

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Chang-Rae Lee
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: July 29
Academic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Seoul Teukbyeolsi
Helping
Sometimes
Love
Crave
Ruin
Ruins
Help

More quotes by Chang-Rae Lee

Image
As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
I really try to forget. I only look at my old works if there's an interview and someone asks me about it. Otherwise, it's not even in the rearview mirror.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
I'd always wanted to write something about the Korean War because of my heritage. My father lost his brother during the war, and I fictionalized that episode, which was told to me very briefly without much detail.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
What if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted? And then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit? But you keep coming back for more?
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
I think the action is ninety-three percent, and the consideration is peppered throughout but pretty short... Once I start it, I feel as though I don't want to look over my shoulder too much. I want to trust the preparations I've made.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
When I'm describing wartime activities or violence I don't want to be too ornate, to prettify the picture. Once we trace them to the present, the prose becomes denser.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
Maybe someone's who's a different kind of writer [would think otherwise] - someone who'd be just as comfortable writing essays on what their novels are about. Sometimes you feel like certain novelists are like that.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn't want to suggest that the past determines the present.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you are at that moment, accrued all through time, so I accept that.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
It's not that I wrote those details, but photos can give you the confidence that you have a real feel for the landscape. Then you can invent with a solid kind of faith, and recreate a feel and flavor of the time, and, one hopes, a tonality, a sense of that time having been lived by those characters.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
One of the things my friends would tell you is that I hang out with a lot of non-writers - just regular people like bankers and teachers, and I actually try to steer our talk away from my work when I get together with them.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
What hasty preparations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we're sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we'll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equipped for the dawn.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference. Technically, I do enjoy the flashback! But not just for informational material.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
I had a visceral connection to the period [of Korean War]. By visceral I suppose I mean emotional. But every fiction requires so much that is not that so I did a lot of other research and a lot of thinking, a lot of struggling there.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.
Chang-Rae Lee