Quote

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

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Chang-Rae Lee
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: July 29
Academic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Seoul Teukbyeolsi
Activity
Ornate
Becomes
Denser
Present
Wartime
Violence
Trace
Describing
Activities
Prose
Picture

More quotes by Chang-Rae Lee

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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.
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It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.
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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.
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You can be affected by a person because of something particular they said or did but sometimes how a person was, a manner of being, that gets most deeply absorbed, and prompts you to revisit certain parts of your life with an enhanced perspective, flowing forward right up to now.
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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.
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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
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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.
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To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.
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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.
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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
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Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.
Chang-Rae Lee
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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.
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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