Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Related Quotes:

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

Business

Honest

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I like making things. I enjoy putting words and images on a blank space. There should be joy in the writing itself because parts of it are so challenging and lonesome. I take great pleasure in reading, researching, and interviewing. I enjoy forming my sentences and revising them to make them clean. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Koreans love to dance; they love to sing. If you actually know Koreans, you see how absurd the stereotype of the 'Asian robot' is. They love to laugh - they're very affectionate. Maybe because of their history of oppression, when they feel you are part of their tribe, they are intensely loyal. I love that about Koreans! "

" I thought, 'Nobody wants this book, and I'm an idiot for having worked on it so hard.' But to succeed in writing, you must be willing to look stupid for a long time. 'Pachinko' took so long because I got it wrong so many times. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 got married when I was 24 and met my husband when I was 22, so what I know about men in a personal experience could literally fill an index card. "

" People often think of America as a classless society, but, of course, that isn't true. Within immigrant communities, there's an enormous distinction of class, depending on who your parents are, and that kind of thing comes out really quick in things like marriage and interpersonal relationships. "

" For me, whatever you write about should be worthy of your attention, worthy of your gifts. That's very important. "

" Koreans are worried about the Japanese right-wing people, who tend to be against foreigners. But the Koreans in Japan aren't even foreigners. They are essentially culturally Japanese. If a family has lived in Japan for three generations, it's absurd to see them as foreigners. "

" 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

" 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. "

" I think that if you're a writer and a woman, then you have to take humiliation very well. "

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

" 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.' "

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