Quote

I rarely talk about work with writers, and I love getting together with writers. I think writers are great to get together with, because we can talk about everything. I think that's why I enjoy it. Writers tend to be pretty open-minded, and pretty profane and loose. They have fun minds.

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
Thinking
Enjoy
Tend
Together
Writers
Everything
Minds
Great
Fun
Work
Pretty
Profane
Mind
Open
Loose
Love
Talk
Minded
Think
Getting
Rarely

More quotes by Chang-Rae Lee

Image
Before I had published anything, I still hung out with people who liked to write. None of us had published, so there was no talk about the business, and there was probably a lot more angsty talk back then. But these days maybe there are some more laments about the culture, but I would say no.
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
Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.
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
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
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 is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.
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
To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.
Chang-Rae Lee
Image
By definition it uses and plays and delights in time. It delights in the interlacing of chronologies and the consequences of that interlacing. And those have personal and psychological expressions in a character. Aside from other issues of writing, psychological characterization is what narrative can do best.
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
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
I did feel a little afraid, as you say, the complete liberty and elasticity of it. But I found that I liked some of the things that it availed me of in terms of emotion and tonal stuff. I came to find it appealing.
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
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
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
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 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
Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.
Chang-Rae Lee