Novelists From The United States

"Characters — conventional women with minor eccentricities — flourished in our world, as Mrs. Cork had no doubt observed. But she'd failed to notice that the characters were all old, rich and pedigreed. Newcomers, especially those of moderate means, were expected to form an attractive but featureless chorus behind our few madcap divas."

"All his leisure clothes were absurd — jokes, really — as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed."

"Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly in conversation, in the same way we may look to written language as an idealization rather than a reflection of ourselves."

"Yes, sex may be at least in part inflected by politics, our fantasies may be at least in part a compendium of cultural myths, but the ways in which sex and fantasy ripen within the individual seem to me to vary so greatly that summaries become useless, even dangerous.But if I were to venture my own generalizations, I would say that with the collapse of other social values (those of religion, patriotism, the family and so on), sex has been forced to take up the slack, to become our sole mode of transcendence and our only touchstone of authenticity. The cry for scorching, multiple orgasms, the drive toward impeccable and virtuoso performance, the belief that only in complete sexual compatibility lies true intimacy, the insistence that sex is the only mode for experiencing thrills, for achieving love, for assessing and demonstrating personal worth — all these projects are absurd."

"Sometimes I look at the battered exteriors of apartment buildings in New York and think how these sorry shells have housed such a long procession of styles. The money! The effort! One tenant mirrors everything, the next panels the walls, the third lines them with mylar, the fourth turns to toile de Jouy, the fifth to pegboard or handblocked rice paper. The expensive if often shoddy interiors installed only to be dismantled, the exterior left untouched as it turns yet another shade sootier — this transience seems a fitting emblem for the way we stay up-to-date without ever changing."

"Being up on something is a way of dismissing it. To espouse any point of view is a danger — it might leave us stuck with last year's cause. Prized for their novelty alone, ideas, gimmicks, trends become equivalent, interchangeable."

"In return for the costliness and inconvenience, the squalor and discomfort of our lives, we get to participate in whatever is the latest. We are never left out of anything: we know what's happening, especially since so many of us practice what Paul Valéry called the "delirious professions." As Valéry wrote, "This is the name I give to all those trades whose main tool is one's opinion of oneself, and whose raw material is the opinion others have of you." Although Valéry was writing eighty years ago of Paris, he anticipated the excruciating position of those gay (and straight) New York "creative people" who must be perpetually original in a "population of uniques." The cruel contradiction of such a position is that the creative "live for nothing but to have, and make durable, the illusion of being the only one — for superiority is only a solitude situated at the present limits of a species." The exigencies of the drive to originality can, as Valéry understood, promote a deep uncertainty about one's personal value. If one is a product, is it new enough? Perfect? One of a kind?"

"Perhaps we'd understood each other too well to be attracted to one another. There were no occlusions in communication, those breaks in understanding that awaken desire."

"He's scattered, his sentences trail off, he sighs frequently, as though he's so intelligent he's always frustrated by the formulaic nature of speech (each sentence a ride you can't get off once the attendant buckles you into the car)."

"I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having "too much" sex. At what point does a "healthy" amount become "too much"? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their cases the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such."

"I saw what I had been fighting for: it was for me, a scared child..."

"(Q: Can you name some contemporary writers whose work you admire?) Erdrich: ...Amy Tan's novels The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife..."

"A further measure of the importance of the feminism of women of color was the tremendous efflorescence in their fiction. The writings of Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan, and Louise Erdrich, among others, played a major role in bringing the feminist message and perspective to the masses of American women."

"I loved the early Amy Tan and her novel The Joy Luck Club."

"Today, great writers from minority groups in the U.S. are finding their voice in the wonderful, rich imagery of magic realism. Writers such as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Amy Tan all have a unique, rich way of writing that can be described as magic realism. These women are among those who have broken away from the style of writing that defines most of the fiction coming from industrialized countries: that pragmatic, minimalist style and way of facing reality in which the only things one dares talk about are those things one can control. What cannot be controlled is denied."

"I was writing for businesses. I think my mother was a little skeptical in the beginning, but fortunately, as a free-lance writer I was successful almost immediately. And so she was very proud, because she measured success in terms of money, which is what I started to do as well. My goal then, became to increase the amount of money that I made each month. Not simply each year, but each month — I mean, talk about pressure — to have more billable hours each month. So that by the end of my third year of being a free-lance writer, I was billing 90 hours a week. I had no time to sleep. I had no life. People said I was crazy, that I was a workaholic. And I couldn't understand how it was that I had these wonderful clients, and I was making all this money, and I wasn't happy and I didn't feel successful. That's when I started to write fiction."

"External success has to do with people who may see me as a model, or an example, or a representative. As much as I may dislike or want to reject that responsibility, this is something that comes with public success. It's important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that's unique for yourself."

"Reading for me was a refuge. I could escape from everything that was miserable in my life and I could be anyone I wanted to be in a story, through a character. It was almost sinful how much I liked it. That's how I felt about it. If my parents knew how much I loved it, I thought they would take it away from me. I think I was also blessed with a very wild imagination because I can remember, when I was at an age before I could read, that I could imagine things that weren't real and whatever my imagination saw is what I actually saw. Some people would say that was psychosis but I prefer to say it was the beginning of a writer's imagination. If I believed that insects had eyes and mouths and noses and could talk, that's what they did. If I thought I could see devils dancing out of the ground, that's what I saw. If I thought lightning had eyes and would follow me and strike me down, that's what would happen. And I think I needed an outlet for all that imagination, so I found it in books."

"People look at me as this very, I don't know, Confucius-like wise person — which I'm not. They don't see all the shit that I've been through."

"I've long thought about how life is influenced by death, how it influences what you believe in and what you look for. Yes, I think I was pushed in a way to write this book by certain spirits — the yin people — in my life. They've always been there, I wouldn't say to help, but to kick me in the ass to write. ...Yin people is the term Kwan uses, because "ghosts" is politically incorrect. People have such terrible assumptions about ghosts — you know, phantoms that haunt you, that make you scared, that turn the house upside down. Yin people are not in our living presence but are around, and kind of guide you to insights. Like in Las Vegas when the bells go off, telling you you've hit the jackpot. Yin people ring the bells, saying, "Pay attention." And you say, "Oh, I see now." Yet I'm a fairly skeptical person. I'm educated, I'm reasonably sane, and I know that this subject is fodder for ridicule. ... To write the book, I had to put that aside. As with any book. I go through the anxiety, "What will people think of me for writing something like this?" But ultimately, I have to write what I have to write about, including the question of life continuing beyond our ordinary senses."

"One relative felt that the story of my grandmother should not have been revealed. My grandmother was the woman (in The Kitchen God's Wife) who had been raped, forced to be a concubine, and finally killed herself. My mother, though, got equally angry at the relative and said, "For so many years, I carried this shame on my back, and my mother suffered, because she couldn't say anything to anybody." And she said, "It's not too late; tell the world, tell the world what happened to her." And I take her mandate to be the one that is in my heart, the one that I should follow."

"Now that I'm angry at Harold, it's hard to remember what was so remarkable about him."

"Other Asian-American writers just shudder when they are compared to me; it really denigrates the uniqueness of their own work. I find it happening less here partly because people are more aware now of the flaws of political correctness — that literature has to do something to educate people. I don't see myself, for example, writing about cultural dichotomies, but about human connections. All of us go through angst and identity crises. And even when you write in a specific context, you still tap into that subtext of emotions that we all feel about love and hope, and mothers and obligations and responsibilities."

"I don't feel the need to be a role model, it's just something that's been thrust upon me. Teachers and a lot of Asian-American organizations, for example, say to me, "We need you to come and speak to us because you're a role model." ... Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden. Someone who writes fiction is not necessarily writing a depiction of any generalized group, they're writing a very specific story."

"Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming — well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate. Isn’t that true?"

"My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco. "Libby-ah," she'll say to me. "Guess who I see yesterday, you guess." And I don't have to guess that she's talking about someone dead."

"You see what power is – holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them."

"Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines."

"Look at this face. Do you see my foolish hope?"

"Why are you attracted only to Chinese nonsense?"

"I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?"

"It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate."

"I have always known a thing before it happens."

"On the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother's case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow."

"Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever."

"That was the night, in the kitchen, that I realized I was no better than who I was... And I no longer felt angry at Waverly. I felt tired and foolish, as if I had been running to escape someone chasing me, only to look behind and discover there was no one there."

"Toni Morrison did make me aware that there are ways to use words, ways that I hadn't been using. I came in by way of pulp science fiction which had begun to annoy me even before I began to think about what else I might do. So writers like Toni Morrison who use the language so well made me aware of other possibilities."

"I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good."

"When I want something to happen — or not happen — I begin to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid. I found the opportunity."

"Only two kind of daughters. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!"

"I had new thoughts, willful thoughts, or rather thoughts filled with lots of won'ts. I won't let her change me, I promised myself. I won't be what I'm not."

"My mother had a look on her face that I'll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate."

"I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control."

"For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds."

"After the gold was removed from my body I felt lighter, more free. They say this is what happens if you lack metal. You begin to think as an independent person."

"I was no longer scared. I could see what was inside me."

"Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain."

"Your father is not my first husband. You are not those babies."

"Over the years, she told me the same story, except for the ending, which grew darker, casting long shadows into her life, and eventually into mine."

"My father has asked me to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club. I am to replace my mother, whose seat at the mah jong table has been empty since she died two months ago. My father thinks she was killed by her own thoughts."