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" 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. "

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" 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'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

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "