Your life is what you see in front of you. -An-mei.
They know where happiness lies, not in a cave or a country, but in love and the freedom to give and take what has been there all along.
My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A’s from the time I was in kindergarten.
I like to go somewhere where I learn something I didn’t know before, like the Dry Tortugas between Florida and Cuba.
I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
I don’t steer clear of genres. I simply haven’t steered myself toward some of them.
Chaos is the penance for leisure.
I didn’t fear failure. I expected failure.
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.
You can get sucked into the idea that, ‘Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.’ Or ‘I’ll write like this because it will impress that critic.’
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.
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.
Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
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.
I’d like to be more forgiving. There are times when I’ve had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.
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.
I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.
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.
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.
I have survivor skills. Some of that is superficial – what I present to people outwardly – but what makes people resilient is the ability to find humour and irony in situations that would otherwise overpower you.