As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately. Chang-Rae Lee More Quotes by Chang-Rae Lee More Quotes From Chang-Rae Lee No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines. Chang-Rae Lee asian offering perfect Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind? Chang-Rae Lee sanctuary vices mind To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated. Chang-Rae Lee honest littles fiction My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled. Chang-Rae Lee korean my-family long For each of us has a perch on the tree. After we are gone, that perch is marked by a notch, permanent, yes, but with its edges muting over time, assuming the tree is ever growing. Years from now someone can see that you were here, or there, and although you had little conception or care for the wider branching, in the next life there might be a sigh of wonder at how quietly flourishing it all was, if never majestic. Chang-Rae Lee tree littles years Like most people, Im fascinated by characters who are completely flawed personalities, riven by anguish and doubt, and are psychologically suspect. Chang-Rae Lee personality character people Most people dont think about race as much as I do. They dont have to. Chang-Rae Lee race people thinking It's not that I wrote those details, but photos can give you the confidence that you have a real feel for the landscape. Then you can invent with a solid kind of faith, and recreate a feel and flavor of the time, and, one hopes, a tonality, a sense of that time having been lived by those characters. Chang-Rae Lee real giving character I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist. Chang-Rae Lee novelists writing war For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know. Chang-Rae Lee soma medicine philosophy A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now. Chang-Rae Lee tales universe ends 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 You can be affected by a person because of something particular they said or did but sometimes how a person was, a manner of being, that gets most deeply absorbed, and prompts you to revisit certain parts of your life with an enhanced perspective, flowing forward right up to now. Chang-Rae Lee perspective said sometimes 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 born want past 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 degrees differences book 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 kind want 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 expression writing character 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 voice past thinking 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 wartime violence want 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 psychics self running
