Top 45 Amy Tan Quotes

My mother always thought if her mother hadn’t left her, she would have been happy. All the problems she had never would have happened.

God, life changes faster than you think.

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.’

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.

I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn’t understand her English, because she was Chinese.

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

She said ‘I’m by commission. You don’t have to pay anything until you sell anything.’ I said, ‘Well fine. You want to be my agent and not make anything.’ I thought, ‘Boy, is she dumb.’

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.

My mother’s openness has remained inspiring to me. I strive to be a skeptic, in the best sense of that word: I question everything, and yet I’m open to everything. And I don’t have immovable beliefs. My values shift and grow with my experiences – and as my context changes, so does what I believe.

I grew up with Bible stories, which are like fairy tales, because my father was a minister. We heard verses and prayers every day. I liked the gorier Bible stories. I did have a book of Chinese fairy tales. All the people except the elders looked like Italians. But we were not a family that had fiction books.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

I didn’t fear failure. I expected failure.

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

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

I went to an exhibition at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum about Shanghai, about how courtesans had been influential in bringing western culture to Shanghai. I bought a book and in it saw this striking group of women in a photograph called ‘The Ten Beauties of Shanghai’.

Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.

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.

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

My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A’s from the time I was in kindergarten.

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

I read academic books on courtesan culture at the turn-of-the century in Shanghai such as Gail Hershatter’s ‘The Gender of Memory’. The diaries were mostly in the form of letters from courtesans to a lover who had disappeared or taken their savings.

In a second-class courtesan house, the courtship was much briefer. It could even be one night; usually it went on a little bit longer. But as the years went by, that period of courtship was shorter and shorter.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.

Until the age of five, my parents spoke to me in Chinese or a combination of Chinese and English, but they didn’t force me to speak Mandarin. In retrospect, this was sad, because they believed that my chance of doing well in America hinged on my fluency in English. Later, as an adult, I wanted to learn Chinese.

I don’t steer clear of genres. I simply haven’t steered myself toward some of them.

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.

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

Luck is in every part of China. Many Chinese stores and restaurants have the word ‘luck’ in their names. The idea is that, just by using the word ‘luck’ in names of things, you can attract more of it. I think that’s true in my life as well. You attract luck because you go after it.

People talk about this ‘bucket list’: ‘I need to go to this country, I need to skydive.’ Whereas I need to think as much as I can, to feel as much as I can, to be conscious and observe and understand me and the people around me as much as I can.

I have a writer’s memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

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.

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

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.

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