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" After I quit being a lawyer in '95, I was having a lot of trouble writing. Then I read somewhere that Willa Cather read a chapter of the Bible every day before she started work. I thought, 'Okay, I'll try it.' Before each writing session, I started to read the Bible like a writer, thinking about language, character, and themes. "

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" I think it's not an accident that you don't have that many Asian American women writers who are breaking out. I don't think it's an accident that you don't have that many Asian American writers, either women or men. I don't think that immigrants are encouraged to become artists. That's very gendered and racialized and ethnicized. "

Min Jin Lee

American

You

Women

" You really should respect other people's work because work is hard-won. "

" Pachinko, like all gambling, is rigged. The house always wins. It's a central metaphor of life. It's rigged, but you keep playing. "

" I had thought that Tokyo would be like New York City, but it wasn't. I'd imagined that they'd be similar in their bustle and noise level, but, in fact, Tokyo is a very calm metropolis. The bright lights and hectic night-life images so often found in advertisements and Western media do not reflect every day Japan. "

" There's a lot of freedom in failure, and I can see that now. "

" We're so willing to dehumanize entire populations in order for us to conveniently go along with our lives. We know exactly one North Korean, for example. The rest of them, we don't know - but it makes it very easy to bomb North Korea if we pretend they're all one person. Literature makes it harder to dehumanize people in this way. "

" As an artist, my wheelhouse is 19th-century literature. I want to write realist novels in a Victorian sense, and the writers I admire in that style tend to do omniscient narration. "

" Education is a beautiful, liberating thing, but I think that tying in education and status, and the need to do well at every cost, is toxic. "

" I moved to Queens, New York, when I was seven and a half. I went to middle school in a foreign country, but I had so many different kinds of Americans push me along and encourage me. I was very odd. I didn't talk very well. We were poor, and we didn't have any connections, but people showed up and pushed me along. "

Min Jin Lee

School

Talk

" Themes don't change very much in story telling, and I think each writer has his or her own territory; however, I think craft and style take a lot of time to develop. I don't think there's any other way to develop your own style without reading your betters. "

" We need to recognize how difficult and important being a mother is. "

" For me, writing a historical novel was really hard. I love history as a subject and majored in it in college. I think, in a way, my training made it worse for me because I knew how important it was to focus on document-based analysis, and I really didn't want to get stuff wrong. "

" One of the nice things about getting older is that you come to understand that you can integrate multiple aspects of your life together. When you're young, you think everything has to be binary, as that's exactly how you feel at that age. "

" A novel, especially a first novel, is... really an emotional autobiography. All these emotions I'm embarrassed at having had, I've written about. "

" I had liver disease. I'm completely cured now, but I thought about if I died from liver cancer, what my life would look like. I followed this wish of being a fiction writer. "

" I have accepted the fact that I don't work very quickly, that I have been rejected a lot as a writer, and that what I do is unusual, so I just have to accept the terms and that it's going to take longer. It is what it is. "

Min Jin Lee

Work

Going

" The omniscient narrator is a bizarre technique, when you think about it, and no one uses it much anymore. But for the novels I want to write, it's the only approach that makes sense to me. "

" I think that the shame of being different is very painful for a lot of people. "

" My father was born on Christmas Day in 1934. He grew up in what is now part of North Korea. When the Korean War began, my father was 16, and he found passage on an American refugee ship,thinking he'd be gone for just a few days, but he never saw his mother or his sister again. "

" We're always observing, and we're cautious people. We really want attention, but at the same time, we're ashamed of wanting attention. All those bizarre qualities of being outside are necessary for being a writer. "

" My husband is half Japanese and half white European-American, and our son is half Korean, quarter Japanese, and a quarter white European-American. "

" We all want to be affiliated with success. It's the impulse of people who have been excluded, and Koreans have been excluded from lots of parties. "

" I have romantic ideas about home and what it should mean. "

" I think that what's bizarre to me about life is that sometimes you have to have everything taken away before you experience grace or before you actually recognize that grace can happen to you. "

" It's my belief that I was a writer - a very hardworking writer - well before I was published. I did care what others thought, and it was embarrassing when people asked me what I had published, so I didn't talk much about writing; rather, I just kept writing. "

" We have huge holes in our education in the West. I think that we have little knowledge of Asian history. If you ask a well-educated, modern Western person about World War II, most will think that the theatre of war was only in Europe. But it's known that the Pacific War was going on concurrently, and we don't know anything about it. "

" I really love Japan, and I liked living there very much, and there are so many terrific things about Japan. However, I do think what's amazing is that Japan really prides itself on being monoracial. It doesn't have the same kind of idea as in the U.K. or Canada or the United States, in which the idea of diversity is a strength. "

" I suffer from an enormous amount of self-doubt, so the fact that 'Pachinko' has been so kindly received has encouraged me not to give up, as I'm always telling myself that, 'Maybe this isn't a smart idea.' "

Min Jin Lee

Suffer

Fact

" I believe there is meaning in life. I believe there is good and evil. "

" I find being an adult very difficult. Being an adult artist, Asian American, incredibly difficult. Or trying, anyway. "