Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" My golden dream was to move to New York and live in the Village and become that cool rebel beatnik Jack Kerouac. "

Related Quotes:

" I spent the first 12 years of my life growing up in Singapore. Back then, in the early '80s, it was still a tropical island at the tip of the Malay Peninsula striving to shine on the world stage. "

" I have pictures of my grandmother from the 1920s and '30s in avant-garde dresses that looked like they could have come from the House of Worth or Lucien Lelong. She would never say if they were couture, but I do recall her telling me, 'All my clothes and shoes came from Paris.' "

" The characters that populate my books are global nomads in their own right, keeping multiple homes around the world and constantly jet-setting to new places. "

" I go to Shenzhen, China, and am taken to a vast luxury spa with a hundred leather recliners and a hundred accompanying plasma screen televisions bolted to the ceiling. "

" In Singapore, there may be 50 old-money families, but you wouldn't know them to look at them. "

" I grew up with a posh English accent, and all my aunts sounded as if they came out of a Merchant Ivory movie. "

" Living in the West, you see how there's only two versions of how Asian men are supposed to be. Either they're very nice, yuppie husbands with children in ads, or they're IT geeks. "

" I come from an old establishment family from Singapore. "

" The idea of Asian ascendancy has entered public culture. "

" I was born in Singapore, and I lived there until I was 12. I had a very fortunate upbringing. "

" I came from a family of extremely old money, and so by the time I was born, there was really just a trickle of money left. "

" Especially in the West, people want to understand Asia on a deeper level because it's become the engine of the world economy, like it or not. "

" My father grew up in a life of extreme privilege. "

" I'm a writer. I'm naturally introverted, so being the public face of something, I don't think I do it well. "

" I have a photographic memory. "

" My books are comedies; I want to take my readers on a jet-setting romp, make them laugh, make them swoon at the beautiful settings, and maybe even make their mouths water at all the food. "

" It's not normal to go into a house and see a pond in the middle of the living room full of baby sharks. It's not normal to go to someone's garage and see a private plane. "

" Every family is a crazy family. "

" In Asia, it's customary to get together with your entire extended family on a regular basis, and it's all rife with politics. "

" To me, families are fascinating. I choose to explore it through comedy and through comic situations. "

" I sort of wanted to reveal this other side of Asia: Southeast Asia, where the Chinese have been wealthy for generations and have different ways of relating to money. I wanted to sort of reveal this world to readers. "

" I've always been drawn to the Edwardian period in England. To me, it seems like such a fascinating time, when the British Empire was at the height of its powers and the strict mores of the Victorian age were dissipating into the decadence of King Edward's reign. "

" I wanted to introduce a contemporary Asia to a North American audience. "

" It used to be, on TV, you'd see only two types of Asians. You'd see the science geek who's using his mobile phone or something like that, or you'd see a very token Asian family - yuppie mother and father and two little Asian kids. It's the last barrier for Hollywood. "

" It would have been amazing to have been a student at Oxford during that golden moment in the 1910s, rubbing elbows with the likes of Aldous Huxley and T.E. Lawrence, before World War I shattered everything forever. "

" No matter our background, we all have crazy families. "

" Such huge money has been made in China - it can be hundreds of millions in a year - and there's a need to validate it by showing what they can buy and how much of it. "

" Hollywood is a whole other level of crazy. I've never met so many assistants who have assistants. It's a stratified society on its own. "

" If I were to generalize a bit, I would say that the ultra rich in Asia live on a scale that far surpasses the wealthy in the U.S. or Europe. "

" I think snobbery is one of the oldest customs in the world, and the rich will always find ways to rank each other and make themselves feel more special than others. "