Amy Tan Quotes

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Amy Tan

Profession : Novelist

Birth : February 19, 1952

I write because I know that one day I will die, and thus I should experience as many deliberate observations, careful thoughts, wild ideas, and deep emotions as I can before that day occurs.

Amy Tan

No one can travel your own road for you; you must travel it for yourself. My faith in this stems from my childhood. I grew up in a family with a system of religious beliefs handed down to me.

Amy Tan

My older brother and I read all the time. My father read, but only things related to religion. One year, he did read a set of stories that was called something like '365 Stories' out loud to us. They followed a family for the year, a page a day. They were about kids with simple problems - like a wheel coming off their bicycle.

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

I'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.

Amy Tan

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.

Amy Tan

Our uniqueness makes us special, makes perception valuable - but it can also make us lonely. This loneliness is different from being 'alone': You can be lonely even surrounded by people. The feeling I'm talking about stems from the sense that we can never fully share the truth of who we are. I experienced this acutely at an early age.

Amy Tan

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.

Amy Tan

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.

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

I felt ashamed of being different and ashamed of feeling that way.

Amy Tan

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.

Amy Tan

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.

Amy Tan

I am an American, steeped in American values. But I know on an emotional level what it means to be of the Chinese culture.

Amy Tan

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.

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

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.

Amy Tan

There is this myth, that America is a melting pot, but what happens in assimilation is that we end up deliberately choosing the American things - hot dogs and apple pie - and ignoring the Chinese offerings.

Amy Tan

I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.

Amy Tan

My writing often contains souvenirs of the day - a song I heard, a bird I saw - which I then put into the novel.

Amy Tan