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" I don't hold any contempt for people who are practicing law. I know how hard it is, I know how hard they work, and I know some of them who are so unhappy with it. "
Min Jin Lee
Know
Unhappy
Work
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" I've often felt like an outsider, not necessarily because I'm Korean, an immigrant, or female. I think writers are odd people. "
Min Jin Lee
Like
Outsider
People
" 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
" If I meet a wise person, I think, 'Yes, tell me more about parenting, about marriage, about how to stay in love. Tell me more about how to be a decent person living in a world that's filled with chaos.' "
Min Jin Lee
Parenting
Marriage
Love
" There's a lot of freedom in failure, and I can see that now. "
Min Jin Lee
Freedom
Lot
See
" 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. "
Min Jin Lee
People
Know
Easy
" When my family was living in Tokyo, there was a year when we couldn't go back to the States for Thanksgiving, and we went to Seoul. Mandu is a highly satisfying substitute for turkey and trimmings. "
Min Jin Lee
Thanksgiving
Living
Back
" 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. "
Min Jin Lee
Thought
Wish
My Life
" 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. "
Min Jin Lee
Think
You
Life
" 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
Me
" I have romantic ideas about home and what it should mean. "
Min Jin Lee
Should
Mean
Romantic
" 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. "
Min Jin Lee
Artist
Style
Literature
" As a woman of colour, as a person who is a minority, I believe its important that other people know about my language and I don't necessarily have to explain. In the same way, when I read 19th-century literature and if I have to understand a Latin phrase or a French phrase, it is incumbent upon me to learn it. "
Min Jin Lee
People
Believe
Language
" My husband is half Japanese and half white European-American, and our son is half Korean, quarter Japanese, and a quarter white European-American. "
Min Jin Lee
Half
Quarter
Our
" For me, whatever you write about should be worthy of your attention, worthy of your gifts. That's very important. "
Min Jin Lee
Attention
Important
You
" We need to recognize how difficult and important being a mother is. "
Min Jin Lee
Important
Difficult
How
" 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. "
Min Jin Lee
Amazing
Diversity
Strength
" 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. "
Min Jin Lee
Change
Own
Reading
" 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. "
Min Jin Lee
Time
Always
People
" I have to be honest about this: I wouldn't tell a lot of kids to go and be writers. It's a tough, tough business. It's not a business. It's more like a tough road. It's a really tough road. "
Min Jin Lee
Go
Business
Honest
" 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. "
Min Jin Lee
Work
Bible
Character
" One thing that struck me in my study of history is how people are excluded. I don't mean just racial minorities or women. Pretty much all poor people who don't have documents are excluded from history and its records. People who were illiterate usually didn't leave any primary documents. "
Min Jin Lee
History
Women
Racial
" 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. "
Min Jin Lee
People
Writing
Care
" 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
Accept
" I find putting oneself out there difficult. I think writing and sharing writing require different skill sets. I want to be read, but it takes courage to ask someone to read your work. "
Min Jin Lee
Skill
Think
Writing
" 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. "
Min Jin Lee
College
Training
Focus
" I find being an adult very difficult. Being an adult artist, Asian American, incredibly difficult. Or trying, anyway. "
Min Jin Lee
Find
Asian
Artist
" A novel, especially a first novel, is... really an emotional autobiography. All these emotions I'm embarrassed at having had, I've written about. "
Min Jin Lee
Embarrassed
Emotions
First
" I think that social migration to another economic class requires a kind of negotiating with yourself. And also, there's so much ambivalence in your heart about who you are and who you're really not. "
Min Jin Lee
Think
You
Yourself
" 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. "
Min Jin Lee
War
Education
History
" 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. "
Min Jin Lee
City
Thought
Media