American - Novelist | February 19, 1952 -
I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
Amy Tan
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I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
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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.
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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.
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I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.
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I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.
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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.
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I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.
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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.
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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.
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It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
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My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.
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