Amy Tan Quotes (94 Quotes)

Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everyone else want best quality. You thinking different.

Isn't that how it is when you must decide with your heart? You are not just choosing one thing over another. You are choosing what you want. And you are also choosing what somebody else does not want, and all the consequences that follow. You can tell yourself, That's not my problem, but those words do not wash the trouble away. Maybe it is no longer a problem in your life. But it is always a problem in your heart.

Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.

I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.

Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with

I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.

I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.

Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines. The Kitchen God's Wife

My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.

That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do.

We are the kind of people who obsess over one word... but we have only one shot to get it right in concert. It was hard the first time I practiced with them. I was so nervous that my vocal chords were paralyzed for about a half-hour.

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

She said 'I'm by commission. You don't have to pay anything until you sell anything.' I said, 'Well fine. You want to be my agent and not make anything.' I thought, 'Boy, is she dumb.'

You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.

Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.

Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.

I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

How can you say luck and chance are the same thing Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterwards.

There are a lot of people who think that's what's needed to be successful is always being right, always being careful, always picking the right path.

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.

I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer.

You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.' Or 'I'll write like this because it will impress that critic.'

Memory feeds imagination.

Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.

I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.

It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.

People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.

My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.

My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.

God, life changes faster than you think.

The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.

My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A's from the time I was in kindergarten.

I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.