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" 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.' "

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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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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

Outsider

People

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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, 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history is not that interesting sometimes, and it can feel a bit medicinal. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "