Quotes by Chang-Rae Lee

About Chang-Rae Lee:

Chang-rae Lee is a Korean American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where he has served as the director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I remember when I was in art classes, I hated following the assignments. And I would get in trouble for doing something totally different or taking it in a weird direction.

Chang-Rae Lee

Suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.

Chang-Rae Lee

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

Chang-Rae Lee

Her endeavor was misguided and wrong and maybe plain crazy, akin to someone waking up one day and deciding he’s going to scale Kilimanjaro because he can’t stop imagining the view from the top, the picture so arresting and beautiful that it too s...

Chang-Rae Lee

Our tainted world looms within us, every one.

Chang-Rae Lee

It was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don’t mean gaining “self-knowledge” or understanding one’s “true nature” but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how ...

Chang-Rae Lee

For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that passion makes us believe we can overleap any walls, obliterate whatever obstacles.

Chang-Rae Lee

He should have had more faith in himself rather than give in to his weaker qualities, in particular his overeagerness to please and aversion to conflict and a lifelong infatuation with hope, which had him dreaming more than doing

Chang-Rae Lee

Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

Chang-Rae Lee

What hasty preperations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we’re sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we’ll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equip...

Chang-Rae Lee

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

Chang-Rae Lee

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

Chang-Rae Lee

In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.

Chang-Rae Lee

Fan would have expected that one or two of the Girls would have long rebelled at spending a life in a room, would have begged, say, the dentist, to help them steal away, but the funny thing about this existence is that once firmly settled we occupy i...

Chang-Rae Lee

But maybe it’s the laboring that gives you shape. Might the most fulfilling times be those spent solo at your tasks, literally immersed or not, when you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation th...

Chang-Rae Lee

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems ...

Chang-Rae Lee

One of the ready advantages of writing a road or quest story is that it mirrors the experience of writing a novel.

Chang-Rae Lee

After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the book would work, but to be honest, I think I knew it would never work, even as I was finishing it.

Chang-Rae Lee

My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled.

Chang-Rae Lee

We grow up with this idea that we're all individual agents. We work, make our money, have our place to live and our satellite TV. But whether you like it or not, you need family or community.

Chang-Rae Lee

Author Bio

  • NameChang-Rae Lee
  • DescriptionNovelist
  • BornJuly 29, 1965
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor; Novelist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Rome Prize