Chang-Rae Lee Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• I wanted to present a sweep and scope of larger events, and a grander backdrop, but most important was to set against that a very singular, real and modest people struggling with every day and human struggles.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Real, Struggle, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I'm more interested in the psychic intricacies that they build up and try to run away from, and how they self-construct. A lot of my work is about self-construction. Here, it's those folks who are deeply wounded and bewildered. They're not just victims of trauma; they've been shaken so forcefully that they don't quite know how or where to stand.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Running, Self, Psychics

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• When I'm describing wartime activities or violence I don't want to be too ornate, to prettify the picture. Once we trace them to the present, the prose becomes denser.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Want, Violence, Wartime

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• There is secrecy and betrayal but that's more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that's modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Betrayal, People, Survival

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I think their pasts are treated with a voice that sees their role as those of innocents. That's reflected in the past time sequences. They're less "written."

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Past, Thinking, Voice

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• By definition it uses and plays and delights in time. It delights in the interlacing of chronologies and the consequences of that interlacing. And those have personal and psychological expressions in a character. Aside from other issues of writing, psychological characterization is what narrative can do best.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Writing, Character, Expression

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I want the flashbacks to feel that once you're there they have their own unity, their own kind of atmospheric sensibility; I want the reader to be transported. The novel is a big, complicated, unknowable thing before it's written.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Unity, Want, Kind

  Source: therumpus.net

  13 Copy quote

• All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference. Technically, I do enjoy the flashback! But not just for informational material.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Book, Differences, Degrees

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn't want to suggest that the past determines the present.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Past, Want, Born

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Maybe someone's who's a different kind of writer [would think otherwise] - someone who'd be just as comfortable writing essays on what their novels are about. Sometimes you feel like certain novelists are like that.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Writing, Thinking, Novelists

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• They're not parallel at all. They're my concerns, but how they're expressed particularly on the page is completely divorced from who I am in my street life.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Who I Am, Pages, Concern

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• Yeah, and the language the "we" has, and the character the "we" has. Because that was the part of the book that I didn't plan out, but the part that I was most curious about as I was writing. You know what you're doing, but you're sometimes still sort of curious as you're writing it.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Book, Writing, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• We can skip through a lot of the stuff people might ask about the writing of the book, and so their comments always start well, well down into the nitty-gritty.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Book, Writing, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I rarely talk about work with writers, and I love getting together with writers. I think writers are great to get together with, because we can talk about everything. I think that's why I enjoy it. Writers tend to be pretty open-minded, and pretty profane and loose. They have fun minds.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Fun, Thinking, Mind

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• It's not that I don't enjoy other people, but what I find with writers is this back and forth. And also, there's no need to talk about work.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  People, Needs, Back And Forth

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Not to any really influential effect, but certainly there have been comments that have surprised me. It's surprising sometimes to get particular perspectives on your work, and it's enlightening sometimes to know that non-writers and readers out there have certain assumptions about everything that I both want to keep in mind and want to forget about why I write, and about the connection between me as a private person and the stuff that I think about on the page.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Writing, Thinking, Perspective

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Usually, when you're talking about work with other writers it's because something seriously bad is going on with your work and you've absolutely thrown out a lifeline and you're hoping that someone will help you with something. Either there's some bad feeling you have about the work, or sometimes it's not specific - just kind of solidarity.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Talking, Feelings, Helping

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Before I had published anything, I still hung out with people who liked to write. None of us had published, so there was no talk about the business, and there was probably a lot more angsty talk back then. But these days maybe there are some more laments about the culture, but I would say no.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Writing, People, Culture

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• One of the things my friends would tell you is that I hang out with a lot of non-writers - just regular people like bankers and teachers, and I actually try to steer our talk away from my work when I get together with them.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Teacher, People, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Some writers are writing one great, big book and just taking all these different avenues towards it. They might seem on the outside to be different, but they're really not. And that's a different kind of mindset. I don't know why it is, but I just feel like I really want to escape myself as much as I can - myself as the artist, or as the writer, or as the thinker - with each new project, because one, it's just boredom, but also, I guess I just feel most comfortable starting a new book if I just feel a little in the dark about it.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Book, Writing, Dark

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I had a visceral connection to the period [of Korean War]. By visceral I suppose I mean emotional. But every fiction requires so much that is not that so I did a lot of other research and a lot of thinking, a lot of struggling there.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  War, Struggle, Mean

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I did a lot of reading of first person accounts from Koreans and combatants and aid workers. And I spoke to relatives. A lot of wonderful photographs were made available to me from that period - 1950-1956 - and those were given to me by a Korean newspaper in Seoul. Ruined villages, refugees streaming through a river valley, GI's and orphans and orphanages, those tiny details that you can only see in a picture.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Reading, Rivers, Village

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• I try to be aware of what I'm concerned about, aware of how I feel about myself in the world, aware of how I feel about the issues of the day, but I guess I don't want to write essays in my head about my craft and maybe it's because I teach and talk about craft of other writers as a reader. I feel the moment I start doing that is when it's going to kill me.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Writing, Issues, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I don't think that stuff is gone - I just don't want to dwell on it. There's a difference. As I said, I think we all have tendencies as writers, and I think we all have experience that we bring as readers to each project.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Thinking, Differences, Gone

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I did feel a little afraid, as you say, the complete liberty and "elasticity" of it. But I found that I liked some of the things that it availed me of in terms of emotion and tonal stuff. I came to find it appealing.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Liberty, Littles, Stuff

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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