Amy Tan Quotes

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Amy Tan

Profession : Novelist

Birth : February 19, 1952

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.

Amy Tan

God, life changes faster than you think.

Amy Tan

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

Amy Tan

I recognise why I have such a strong inability to forgive certain people who betray me. It's chiselled in, like a name on a tomb stone.

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.

Amy Tan

I'm usually woken by a vibration on my up-band. It's the gradual vibration for about ten seconds, and then the chimes of my blue light. It's just a way to wake gently. It all gently puts me into awake-mode. I play music off of my Sonos playlist. 'The Rachmaninoff Concerto 3 in D-minor', 1st movement.

Amy Tan

My mother left behind three daughters when she went to America and started a new life. I certainly felt abandoned when my father died of a brain tumour; I felt he had abandoned me to this terrible, volatile mother and I had no protection.

Amy Tan

For many courtesans, it was over by age 22.

Amy Tan

My grandmother. She's someone I never met, and I would've loved to have met her. She's been a huge influence on our entire family, not just me. She is a mystery. It's not clear exactly what about her is truth and myth.

Amy Tan

My breakfast is usually a wholegrain cereal or porridge, with walnuts sprinkled in it, berries, a tablespoon of honey, and chia seeds. I have coffee and a little cherry juice with seltzer. I have a seat by the window, and I look out at the view.

Amy Tan

Mothers have this huge influence, and I feel like they're always teaching us from the day we're born what to be afraid of, what to be cautious of, what we should like, and what we should look like.

Amy Tan

I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.

Amy Tan

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.

Amy Tan

My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.

Amy Tan

We are the kind of people who obsess over one word... but we have only one shot to get it right in concert. It was hard the first time I practiced with them. I was so nervous that my vocal chords were paralyzed for about a half-hour.

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing about emotional confusion with my mother related to our different beliefs. Hers was based in family history, which I didn't know anything about. I always felt hesitant in talking about Chinese culture and American culture.

Amy Tan

I like to go somewhere where I learn something I didn't know before, like the Dry Tortugas between Florida and Cuba.

Amy Tan

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.

Amy Tan