Nam Le Quotes

#1. Art, after all, is - at its best - a lie that tells us the truth.

Nam Le

#2. I write under not only the presumption that everything I write is deeply conditioned by everything I've already written, but that everything I write changes, retroactively, all those things I've already written.

Nam Le

#3. That was the problem with Alison Fischer: you never knew which part of her to look at. He looked at her face

Nam Le

#4. I do believe that you can never know yourself let alone the person next to you let alone the person halfway across the world. Yet at the same time I believe there is nothing like fiction to fully thrust you into someone else s consciousness.

Nam Le

#5. The thing is not to write what no one else has written but to write what only you could have written.'
I found this fragment in my old notebooks. The person who wrote that couldn't have known what would happen: how a voice hollows how words you once loved can wither on a page.

Nam Le

#6. -honor won in youth grows with age.

Nam Le

#7. You couldn't think of after, you only thought of now, and come to think of it, you didn't do that either -- you were left with pools of memory, each stranded from the next by time pulling forward like a tide.

Nam Le

#8. If you ask me why I came to Iowa, I would say that Iowa is beautiful in the way that any place is beautiful: if you treat it as the answer to a question you're asking yourself every day, just by being there.

Nam Le