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" My mother likes to say that I was conceived to shop - not just born to shop. My whole life as a child was following her and her sister and friends around on her shopping trips. "

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" As a child, I didn't even realize I was Chinese. I was Singaporean, but my identity was wrapped up in the culture I was experiencing every day. "

Kevin Kwan

Day

Identity

Child

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

" I remember I had an aunt that lived in a house that had this beautiful ceramic wall that was entirely a painting of a peacock. "

" I'm naturally a shy, quiet person. "

" Canada has become such a staging area for Chinese money. "

" I moved to New York and went to art school at Parsons School of Design. Became a photographer. Became a creative consultant. "

" I love romantic comedies more than anything. "

Kevin Kwan

Anything

Love

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

" Writers often say that characters begin to write themselves, and I never used to believe that. I always thought that was complete hogwash. "

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

" One of the dreams on my wish list is to spend more time in Thailand. "

" 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. "

" They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel. "

" It's human nature when you first make your big fortune to want to show off a bit. I don't begrudge that whatsoever. "

" 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. "

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

Kevin Kwan

Extreme

Father

" As a child, I could bike down the hill from my house and grab an ice-cold bottle of soda from the neighborhood grocer, which was nothing more than a corrugated metal shack run by two Indian men clad in sarongs. "

" 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 love Netflix and Amazon and watching movies on streamers as much as the next person. "

" My father came from old money. There was less of an expectation for the children to earn a living. "

" 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. "

Kevin Kwan

Ceiling

Leather

" I know an elderly society matron in Singapore who would rather walk in the scorching sun for blocks on end rather than have her chauffeur drive into the Central Business District at peak hour and pay the $1.50 surcharge. "

" My father went to boarding school in Sydney when he was 14. "

Kevin Kwan

Sydney

Boarding

" Warner Bros. is just this amazing historic studio that does great movies. "

" 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. "

" I do believe that peoples' natures can be changed, and they have to be changed if we want to live in this modern world and be a part of it. "

" The China Rich seem to be spending on a scale that's just beyond anything we've ever seen before. They are building and buying an insane amount of luxury residences around the world, commissioning huge flying palaces from Boeing, and paying ridiculous amounts for art. "

" I would not call my family 'traditional Chinese.' We were more what I would term the Colonial Chinese. "

" Certainly, living in the U.S., as I have for over two decades, you see how Asians are portrayed in the media... I didn't see myself represented, you know, when I used to look at ads on TV. "

" When my first novel, 'Crazy Rich Asians,' was published in 2013, many readers were astonished to learn that in Asia, there were women who dressed in couture from morning till night. "