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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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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 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. "

" 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 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.' "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "