Novelists From The United States

"as a woman, it's absolutely clear to me that we have the freedom of creating alternate myths, and for Frank Chin, as a male, there is a monolith, one monument of a myth. The other difference-I just discovered this recently and am very surprised at this coincidence-I think he just published his translation of The Art of War [Sun Tzu, ca., 500 B.C., ascribed to Sun Wu], one of the traditional Chinese books of war. He's brought this into the world at the same time that I am writing my book of peace. You can see the fundamental difference in values."

"What are the real important issues at stake? I have identified two. One of them is the racial and cultural myths. Whom do they belong to? Frank would say they belong to real Chinese such as himself. And they do not belong to, for example, the Caucasians. My feeling is, if somebody goes to a bookstore and buys my book, then they have bought the myths, and they can have the great myths of China by reading them. The only way that myths stay alive is if we pass them on. He has also been saying that there is a true text, including the chant of the Woman Warrior. Now I know that myth is not passed on by text; it's mostly passed on by word of mouth, and every time you tell a story and every time you hear it, it's different. So there isn't one frozen authentic version; there are many, many authentic versions different from person to person."

"there are plenty of black men and Asian men who love Alice Walker's work. And they love my work. And there isn't even a battle going on. It's Ishmael Reed all by himself. It's Frank all by himself. But the press plays it up as if it's all these Asian men against me. I think that for a while Frank got so much press because the press didn't know who else to call. So every time a new book comes out, they call Frank and then he speaks as if he's speaking for everyone and says, "Oh, we hate Amy Tan; we hate Maxine." But it's just him; he doesn't speak for anybody."

"("San Francisco writer Edward Iwata wrote, "The struggle between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston is a literary battle for the soul of Asian Americans". How do you respond to this?") A: For a while I just thought, Why doesn't Frank Chin just shut up and go home and write? The only way he's making a literary reputation is to attack me. He doesn't have anything else going for him. That's his career. And by doing that he is destroying himself as a writer because he is just wasting his words. This idea of writing for the soul of Asian America-maybe there is something there. I no longer read Frank Chin, but I hear that the latest works are an attempt to find Chinese American manhood through a violent, warrior mythos, trying to find an identity with killers, with knights from the past who solved things by going to war. He says that our history is one of battle, of blood. I know that he has battle cries and one of his mottoes is, "War." He says it in Chinese. I am going in the completely different direction. I am looking for a language of peace. I am trying to rewrite a book of peace. And so maybe that is fighting for the soul, not just of Chinese American people, but the human soul. I want the human soul to be one where people care for one another and where people cherish and nourish and value one another, and I am trying to think of ways of conflict resolution that have to do with talking or hugging or something, whereas his idea of conflict resolution is to kill each other."

"I am out of theatre. I will not work with any theatre, producer, writer, director, or actor who plays and lives the stereotype. So I write fiction, essays, and articles."

"That this play is the first play by an Asian American at our existence, is proof of the great success white racism has had with us. America might love us. But America’s love is not good. It’s racist love. I don’t want it."

"The first thing that begins to happen when you begin taking yourself seriously as a writer is this imaginary writer’s block that people talk about, but I never really suffered from. But there’s this barrier between the spoken word and the written word, once you set something down in writing it’s supposed to be set in stone or you take on this funny attitude that writing is unnatural…"

"My main concern was to write a novel that uses all of this stuff that is accessible, to write a novel that deals with white racism and Chinese American history and the real Chinese fairy tales and the heroic tradition, and to demonstrate that a Chinese American could do all of this without sending whites up the wall or alienating anybody…"

"My favorite definition of magic realism is by Ariel Dorfman, who said in an NPR interview about his play, Widows, "When people who have nothing demand everything, that’s real magic.""

"when 9/11 was taking place in the U.S., few journalists, except people like Ariel Dorfman, few of them mentioned that there was another 9/11 that took place in Chile created by the terrorism that the United States government, in a way, was supporting through the CIA...Dorfman wrote a wonderful editorial in The New York Times, an op/ed about two or three days ago, and he said that Pinochet's dirty dealings with his money were found because through the Patriot Act they discovered that he had money in the Riggs Bank, and he became like a terrorist that stole $8 million, but he also says that it was the same secrecy that Pinochet governed that allowed him to steal the money. So secrecy is dangerous no matter how you look at it, and he was talking the secrecy of the Patriot Act."

"(Why do so many South American Jews write about oppression?) People like Timerman and Dorfman were part of generations that suffered terribly because of dictatorships. So they write about what happened to them and their countries, and have the courageous belief that an author should write about things as a witness."

"The past is really unknowable, but it’s got to be knowable enough so that we can seek forgiveness for our crimes…"

"More than a traveler, I’m a displacer. In other words, I’m a person who is constantly meditating on what it means not to arrive at a place, but to be on my way somewhere else."

"Not to belong anywhere, to be displaced, is not a bad thing for a writer…If you can deal with it. If it doesn’t destroy you."

"I think the genre decides for me—which sounds like a way of avoiding the question unless I explain first that this chameleon-like border crossing, this shifting of genre identities is, I realize, parallel to, or anticipates, or recollects my own life. I’m probably fluctuating across genres perhaps because my identity itself is always in flux…"

"My determination to make my own way in the world must not make me stupid."

"The grand duc is lost in a cloud of delusion that masquerades as mysticism."

"Few people in the Costa Drago prayed. Those who did so were hopeless optimists who believed the Unseeable Gods were yet capable of influencing human affairs if you just spoke to them often enough with rituals of fire or water, pain or lovemaking—anything that might breach the boundaries of the Night Eternal. But no matter how they tried, we yet suffered plagues and wars and the earth yet shook and the mountains yet fumed."

"“This means war. And who suffers most if powerful families go to war?” “Everyone else but them.”"

"“That was a brave thing.” “Didn’t feel at all brave. Just desperate.” “Bravery results from desperation more often than we’d like to think.”"

"“In those peaceful days, some came to believe that the Unseeable Gods had returned at last and merely awaited our notice. The hopeful built temples like this one all over the Costa Drago, tall spare structures that shaped the light. They filled them with artworks that rejected the forms of common life in favor of the ethereal and sublime.” I pointed up to the astonishing dome, its soaring windows bereft of glass. Peeling frescoes revealed only bits of once-brilliant color. “They added fountains and channels to carry Father Atladu’s waters, and orchards and gardens to honor Mother Gione and her bounteous earth. They designed labyrinths to prevent demons from infesting the space. But just as the temples were completed, the plague struck. Wave after wave of disease scoured the world over a span of seventy years. By the time the last body was burnt, the Costa Drago had lost half of our people, and no one believed in benevolent gods anymore, seeable or unseeable.” Indeed, in the recovering world, merchants and bankers like Sandro’s family had found more profitable concerns than myths and superstitions and gods who could not bother to make themselves known. The temples of the Unseeable Gods fell to ruin."

"Reason crushed that idiocy instantly."

"Everything I have accomplished in this city, everything I have yet to accomplish, takes its root in the rule of law. If I am complicit in lawbreaking—if I interfere and exonerate a confessed felon because of my personal preferences—then I am no better than my uncle you once named monster."

"I remarked that it must be difficult to anticipate betrayal from lifetime friends. “It is as it has always been,” he said. “From boyhood, I’ve had to assume that every person at my table, friend or stranger, carries a knife ready to let my blood or wears a pocket ring primed to drop poison into my wine. It is a not-so-nice consequence of Lady Fortune’s abundant blessings. Certain, the habit has saved my life more than once.”"

"I have never believed in fate or destiny or any other concept that invests the courses of our lives with portentous meaning. Most people in our godless world believe we are born into random circumstance, and it is solely our own deeds and choices that determine whether we find ourselves in a palace or prison when we die. I’d not disagree."

"If nothing else, fiction has empowered a lot of people in the act of resistance. The Hate U Give, I know, has birthed several young activists and I’m so happy with that, I’m so proud these young people have decided to speak up and speak out on things that concern them. There was one young lady in Texas, it started out with her deciding she was going to speak up for the book when it was challenged by the school district. And that led to her becoming an activist in her own right in other areas. So I think books can empower. Rudine Sims Bishop [the author and educator] says that books are either mirrors, windows or sliding-glass doors, and that’s important in the act of resistance. You need that mirror to see yourself, to know what you can be and know what you are. And then you need that window to see into someone else’s life so you can understand what’s happening around you in the world that you may not notice at first glance. And you need the sliding-glass door so that you can step into someone else’s life and walk in with some empathy and use that empathy to make yourself heard. So yeah, I think books play a huge role in resistance. They play a huge role in opening people’s eyes and they’re a form of activism in their own right, in the fact that they do empower people and show others the lives of people who may not be like themselves.""

"I compare Bri and Starr to Biggie and Tupac…Without the beef! Tupac was very community-orientated, and that’s how Starr is. But Bri, similar to Biggie, she’s about making it, she’s about seeing her dreams come to life. She’s about trying to save her family, and there’s nothing wrong with that. So that’s where they’re different, but they’re similar in the fact that they are both powerful young women who know they have voices, and they both understand how they can use those voices to affect an entire generation."

"I’ve been really intrigued by the idea of the end of the world — how it’s never really real, though it may feel like it is to us living in the midst of climate change as we are. Except on the scale of billions of years, according to the kind of timeline where suns birth and die and so on, worlds are quite adaptive creatures. Earth has had five or so ice ages. Dinosaurs have come and gone, many dying, others living on as birds. Mass extinction is par for the planet’s course…"

"It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear me say that boundaries between genres are not borders to be respected so much as walls to tear down. I can’t imagine being a writer of only one genre, and I find that most of the time, even works that I’m writing to fit a particular genre are influenced by my experience of other genres. I think that everything I write is “literary,” but we also have to understand that these terms have marketing implications and so on…"

"Once upon a time I wrote the way a very young child draws, with absolute confidence that the work is genius. A splotch of colour there. A smear. Spirals and zigzags. Exploration and process are at the heart of art when we are only beginning. My writing has always been intentional. Both intensity of feeling and lushness of language have been primary goals of mine from the get go, but it did not always involve this level of anxiousness, of desperation…"

"Part of me wonders if I should’ve labelled by characters according to contemporary definitions of gender and sexuality so there’d be no doubt in anyone’s mind. To me, all of these labels are context dependent and therefore it does not feel authentic or organic to use words that have developed out of our contemporary discourse to describe my characters…"

"Our people say no condition is permanent, Mr. Edwards. Good times must come to an end, just like bad times, whether we want it or not."

"It's so hard to be a stranger in a strange land. I don't think most people understand how difficult it is to leave behind what you know and come to a country where everything about you is considered "different.""

"People in this country, always worrying about how to eat, they pay someone good money to tell them: Eat this, don’t eat that. If you don’t know how to eat, what else can you know how to do in this world?"

"…The reason why people connected with the characters is because they are real, and to write real characters you have to go deep into them. As a human you look at another human and you come with your own judgements, but as a writer you have to put that aside and just look at people for who they are. It is a process, and much of it is subconscious…"

"I did not do it because I wanted to one day have a book deal…I did it because I loved it, and I enjoyed it, and I did not know where it was going to take me. I did it out of love of the art."

"…One of my favorite things was that television was all in English. Growing up an English speaker in a predominantly French-speaking country, I couldn’t understand most TV shows since they were in French, so coming to America allowed me to enjoy such a simple pleasure…"

"…The song does remember the deceased, and it’s the song that helps the deceased move on—to ascend, in the words of the poem, to the next life. I wanted to take that and apply it to senses of transition and, hopefully, ascendance within life, moments where one feels one has to move on and move up. I didn’t know it would become an ongoing, theoretically endless series—"

"I think that the audience for poetry has widened in recent years and maybe it's continuing to widen—I hope so. The whole poetry slam phenomenon has created an interest and widened the audience for poetry in significant ways. There's a lot that needs to be done, obviously. But poetry is one of those things that just won't go away, and people keep rediscovering it. I think every generation has a poetry boom, or gives a boom to poetry, gives itself to poetry. There is also a growing sense that poetry has great variety to it, that there are many ways of going about it. I think with the recognition of that variousness, there's been a growth in the audience."

"…to the extent that categories and the way things are defined -- the boundaries between things, people, areas of experience, areas of endeavor -- to the extent that those categories and definitions are rooted in social and political realities, anything one does that challenges them, that transgresses those boundaries and offers new definitions, is to some extent contributing to social change…"

"…Drift is the tension and play between spirit and matter. Spirit wants to be unbound. It’s the tension between spirit and letter as well, the play between spirit and letter, the tangential way of knowing that the expression “you get my drift” gets at, not to mention the turns spirit and letter take toward each other and away from each other. Language, especially poetic language, replicates or is infused with the relationship between spirit and matter, the traffic between spirit and letter, its analogue…"

"…I think figures accrue to and build on feeling, and it’s no doubt the case that orphaning speaks of and from an emotional disposition I’m both inclined toward and see applying beyond myself. The orphan is such an archetypal figure, recurrent not only in my work but in world culture, because it tugs at the roots of our sense of belonging and the mix of anxiety and solace that goes with that sense…"

"So many black kids are put in that position, so I wanted to show that there is no one way to talk black. There is a stereotype that if you sound ghetto, and you use a lot of slang, that makes you black. I wanted to show this girl who exists in these two different worlds. Which Starr is the real Starr? There are so many adults who identify with that, too. I went through it myself when I was in college…"

"Teenagers give me hope. We write them off so often. But I'm seeing a lot of things in this generation that’s coming up that gives me a lot of hope for the future. So I tell them when I'm in the old folks home, I think I can relax because I think you guys are going to do a great job."

"I'm okay with people saying “oh the language makes me uncomfortable,” but if the language is what makes you uncomfortable, consider yourself privileged. I'm more uncomfortable about the killing of unarmed black people in this country."

"Anyone can go to the shop and buy anything and give to anyone, he told Liomi when the boy asked him for the umpteenth time why he couldn’t get even a little toy truck. The true measure of whether somebody really loves you, he lectured, is what they do for you with their hands and say to you with their mouth and think of you in their heart."

"Home will never go away Home will be here when you come back You may go to bring back fortune You may go to escape misfortune You may even go, just because you want to go But when you come back We hope you’ll come back Home will still be here."

"But the Universe gives us different sources of Love to unite us all as One. Who are we to decide what the source of our Love should be at any given time? Love is Love, and at any given point we have everything we need."

"To the Native community, (Trump)’s kind of like the new incarnation of Andrew Jackson: you know, bad president for Indian people, bad president for everybody. But, you know, to us, and to be super honest, I mean, we don’t have a lot of experience with great presidents. You know, what we have experience with is that we’re going to fight this out, and we’re going to make the next economy. We’re going to make our future. That’s what self-determination is about."

"What I want to do is to rebuild the hemp industry in Indian country. And I want us at the table, not on the menu. I want us to be in the leadership of this next economy, because we have a lot of territory upon which you can grow hemp. And we can rebuild the light manufacturing industry in this country."