Amy Tan Quotes

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

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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.'

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

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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Memory feeds imagination.

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I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.

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