Top 100 Chang-rae Lee Quotes
#1. We labor hard for certain but the work is rote and our tomorrows are mostly settled and the way we love one another is cast by the form of our excellent contiguity, a rigorous closeness that only rarely oversteps its bounds.
Chang-rae Lee
#2. 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
#3. He should have had more faith in himself rather than give in to his weaker qualities, in particular his overeagerness to please and aversion to conflict and a lifelong infatuation with hope, which had him dreaming more than doing
Chang-rae Lee
#4. 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
#5. It's not that I don't enjoy other people, but what I find with writers is this back and forth. And also, there's no need to talk about work.
Chang-rae Lee
#6. Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?
Chang-rae Lee
#7. I don't think that stuff is gone - I just don't want to dwell on it. There's a difference. As I said, I think we all have tendencies as writers, and I think we all have experience that we bring as readers to each project.
Chang-rae Lee
#8. Yeah, and the language the "we" has, and the character the "we" has. Because that was the part of the book that I didn't plan out, but the part that I was most curious about as I was writing. You know what you're doing, but you're sometimes still sort of curious as you're writing it.
Chang-rae Lee
#9. The constant cry is that you belong here, or you make yourself belong, or you must go. (1998: 319)
Chang-rae Lee
#10. Whether the people are happy or not in their lives, they have learned to keep steadily moving, moving all the time.
Chang-rae Lee
#11. I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.
Chang-rae Lee
#12. I think their pasts are treated with a voice that sees their role as those of innocents. That's reflected in the past time sequences. They're less "written."
Chang-rae Lee
#13. 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.
Chang-rae Lee
#14. In America, he said, it's even hard to stay Korean.
Chang-rae Lee
#15. The question, then, is whether being an "individual" makes a difference anymore. That it can matter at all. And if not, whether we in fact care.
Chang-rae Lee
#16. Sometimes, when he wanted to hide or not outright lie, he chose to speak in English. He used to break into it when he argued with my mother, and it drove her crazy when he did and she would just plead, "No, no!" as though he had suddenly introduced a switchblade into a clean fistfight.
Chang-rae Lee
#17. Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.
Chang-rae Lee
#18. She was quite enrapt, we were certain, even as her face remained almost totally blank, just as a drinking glass remains unchanged when filled with water but of course it is not at all the same.
Chang-rae Lee
#20. Or maybe another baby might have helped us. Another try. Of course, that's the worst reason to have a child, anyone on the street can tell you that, because no one can handle being an attempt at something from the very start, (1998: 200)
Chang-rae Lee
#21. The most wretched of sights, the just-crushed spirit.
Chang-rae Lee
#22. For if there is ever a moment when we are most vulnerable, it's when we're closest to the idea of the attained desire, and thus farthest from ourselves, which is when we'll tread through any flame.
Chang-rae Lee
#23. And while it's easy to say this is a situation to be avoided, isn't this what we also fear and crave simultaneously, that some internal force which defies understanding might remake us into the people we dream we are?
Chang-rae Lee
#24. A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there is finally no telling exactly where it begins, where it ends, or where it places you now.
Chang-rae Lee
#25. One of the ready advantages of writing a road or quest story is that it mirrors the experience of writing a novel.
Chang-rae Lee
#26. 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
#27. Indelible, our last clues to a beautiful woman
Chang-rae Lee
#28. I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.
Chang-rae Lee
#29. There is secrecy and betrayal but that's more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that's modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.
Chang-rae Lee
#30. Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap.
Chang-rae Lee
#31. I think my parents recognised that I'd always wanted to be a writer, and so they didn't think that this was some idle, faddish wish on my part.
Chang-rae Lee
#33. Most people don't think about race as much as I do. They don't have to.
Chang-rae Lee
#34. We can skip through a lot of the stuff people might ask about the writing of the book, and so their comments always start well, well down into the nitty-gritty.
Chang-rae Lee
#36. I can put together a pretty decent meal from whatever happens to be in the refrigerator and the pantry. I like the challenge of this sort of improvisation, the rigor of limitation and sometimes having to take a risk.
Chang-rae Lee
#37. A novel, even a social realist one, can't simply be a comprehensive rendering of what is. A novel requires a special angle or approach, whether in structure or language or theme, to justify itself.
Chang-rae Lee
#38. Before I start my work in the morning, I need to have quickly browsed the entire paper, noting articles that I want to read during lunch.
Chang-rae Lee
#39. 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
#40. It's perhaps more laudable simply to keep heading out into the world than always tilting to leave one's mark on it.
Chang-rae Lee
#41. My parents - my mother, particularly - were very focused on our succeeding. I loved my parents, and was very grateful to them for everything, and I didn't want to disappoint them.
Chang-rae Lee
#42. I don't believe complete assimilation is possible, at least not for anyone who has an active, open mind. Every step, every entry into the flows of existence can be seen as a beginning, a commencement of a brand new way of seeing oneself in the world. This is the case for everyone.
Chang-rae Lee
#43. I wanted to present a sweep and scope of larger events, and a grander backdrop, but most important was to set against that a very singular, real and modest people struggling with every day and human struggles.
Chang-rae Lee
#44. We reshape the story even when we believe we are simply repeating it.
Chang-rae Lee
#45. I'll read pretty much anywhere and anytime, but for a while now, I've really enjoyed reading on flights, especially the longer hauls, when I'm unplugged from everything and can completely immerse myself in the world of a book and submit happily to its rhythms, perspectives, ideas.
Chang-rae Lee
#47. Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe, I don't like proper dress while working. I like writing in pajama-like clothing, which eases and relaxes me and allows me to connect with the decidedly improper.
Chang-rae Lee
#48. In my other books, things do happen, but they are kind of bookends to the real action, which for me was an exploration of consciousness. Not that I don't get into the consciousness of the people in 'The Surrendered,' but you could say there's not as much anxiety about it.
Chang-rae Lee
#49. What hasty preperations 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
#50. It was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don't mean gaining "self-knowledge" or understanding one's "true nature" but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology.
Chang-rae Lee
#51. I don't listen to music while writing; it seems to me I'm trying to make my own kind of music, and to have anything else going on is just noisy interference.
Chang-rae Lee
#52. Isn't it better that we send them off once and for all beneath the glow of carnival lights, with the taste of treats on our tongues, rather than invite the acrid tang of doubt, and undue longing, and the heart-stab of a freshly sundered bond?
Chang-rae Lee
#53. After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the book would work, but to be honest, I think I knew it would never work, even as I was finishing it.
Chang-rae Lee
#54. We grow up with this idea that we're all individual agents. We work, make our money, have our place to live and our satellite TV. But whether you like it or not, you need family or community.
Chang-rae Lee
#55. 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
#56. Even though I went to Exeter and Yale, and I enjoyed all the trappings of those places, I think at the same time - and maybe it's because I'm an immigrant kid and not white - there was always this other consciousness; that is, I was conscious of everything that was going on.
Chang-rae Lee
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. It seems I have always been fortunate to be in a certain provident, which must be my sole skill, and worth, and luck. [p. 138]
Chang-rae Lee
#60. I want the flashbacks to feel that once you're there they have their own unity, their own kind of atmospheric sensibility; I want the reader to be transported. The novel is a big, complicated, unknowable thing before it's written.
Chang-rae Lee
#61. We feel ever obliged by everday charges and tasks. They conscript us more and more. We find world enough in a frame. Until at last we take our places at the wheel, or wall, or line, having somewhere forgotten that we can look up.
Chang-rae Lee
#62. It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war.
Chang-rae Lee
#63. 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
#64. Historical novels are about costumery. I think that's the magic and mystery of fiction. I don't want to write historical fiction but I do want the story to have the feel of history. There's a difference.
Chang-rae Lee
#65. Like most people, I'm fascinated by characters who are completely flawed personalities, riven by anguish and doubt, and are psychologically suspect.
Chang-rae Lee
#66. For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.
Chang-rae Lee
#67. For me, that's always been one of the great charms of the first person: we gain access to a very personal, private kind of music.
Chang-rae Lee
#68. For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that passion makes us believe we can overleap any walls, obliterate whatever obstacles.
Chang-rae Lee
#69. It's in the tilting and thrashing that we wangle our luck.
Chang-rae Lee
#70. This is how we were meant for each other. How we make our living. The lives of frustrated poets and imposters. This, too, how the love works and then doesn't: a mutual spectacle of imagination.
Chang-rae Lee
#71. I don't like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can't go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises.
Chang-rae Lee
#72. We know the point of the 2010 Census is to count us, one by one, to tally every last resident, but the massive project of course has more prying, if limited, interests.
Chang-rae Lee
#73. I'm not the sort of writer who can plan out things. Mostly I have no idea where I'm going.
Chang-rae Lee
#74. He admired Fan for being Fan, which is to say the kind of person who would keep the right perspective on such qualified information).
Chang-rae Lee
#75. 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
#76. I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.
Chang-rae Lee
#77. 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
#78. We read and remember certain writers because they offer distinctive voices and perspectives, because they've given themselves over completely and passionately to their obsessions while vigorously ignoring everything else.
Chang-rae Lee
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. He said you could tell about a person not from what he believed, but by what worried him.
Chang-rae Lee
#82. I often think that the prime directive for me as a teacher of writing is akin to that for a physician, which is this: do no harm.
Chang-rae Lee
#83. 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
#84. 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
#86. I don't feel uncomfortable in America, but every once in a while, I'm reminded that people don't see me the way I see me. It doesn't change my life, but it gives me a consciousness about it.
Chang-rae Lee
#87. What's fun about a dystopian novel is that we can enjoy and be entertained. But that world is only slightly different, right? It's familiar enough to be recognizable, and skewed enough to give us pause.
Chang-rae Lee
#88. It seems to me that life's moments don't have to be so right or not right anymore, so fraught and weighted with "valve", but just of themselves, what they are ...
Chang-rae Lee
#90. It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.
Chang-rae Lee
#91. My writing day follows my family's day. I get a good few hours in the mornings when the kids are out of the house. And I don't work at night any more. I like to see my family.
Chang-rae Lee
#93. I remember when I was in art classes, I hated following the assignments. And I would get in trouble for doing something totally different or taking it in a weird direction.
Chang-rae Lee
#94. I didn't leave Wall Street because the work was against my nature - I do have a pretty good head for numbers. I left because I had this love for writing.
Chang-rae Lee
#95. Don't sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?
Chang-rae Lee
#96. My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled.
Chang-rae Lee
#97. What does the pilgrim hope for at journey's end? Her beliefs confirmed? Revelation? Or does she secretly wish that the destination never quite materializes, that it keeps receding, ever shrouded in the distance, all the more to feed an inextinguishable devotion?
Chang-rae Lee
#98. 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
#99. And too intense a longing, everyone knows, can lead to poor decisions, rash actions, hopes that become outsized and in turn deform reality
Chang-rae Lee
#100. To be honest, I'm not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.
Chang-rae Lee
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