Quotes from Alexander Chee

Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road wound through life

1. Sometimes music is needed. 2. Sometimes silence. 3. A novel, like all written things, is a piece of music, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it. Writing one, then, is like remembering a song you've never heard before.

I resented the idea of being talented. I couldn't respect it — in my experience, no one else did. Being called talented at school had only made me a target for resentment. I wanted to work. Work, I could honor.

Why was there never an opera that ended with a soprano who was free?

Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work.

It was such a hard thing, this virtue, it seemed to me. Keeping it was like having to grip the knife by the blade and defend yourself with the hilt. Ever since I'd been old enough to know about virtue in a woman, it had seemed like a bull's-eye painted on my head in rouge. I was sure, as I was led away, I would be better off without it. It was better to be done with it and be gone.

There are two kinds of people, I think: those who want to know the future and those who do not. I've never met anyone ambivalent about this. I have been both kinds. For now, I think I know which one is better, but I'm prepared to change my mind again. It may be I am like that drunk who tells himself he can handle his alcohol now. But if I told you I could tell the future, you would laugh at me. And I would laugh at me too.

What if the novel in you is one you yourself would never read? A beach novel, a blockbuster, a long, windy, character-driven literary drama that ends sadly? What if the one novel in you is the opposite of your idea of yourself?

The storm is a glazier. Then fog passes through, touches the cold trees to add to the ice already there. Here the wind spins glass from the water it has stolen off the sea and the lakes, off the hair on my head and the breath out of my mouth, the storm takes the water from us all everywhere, to make of a mountain range a stained-glass depiction of a saint no one knows.

Everything is already moving so very fast, but you need a great deal more speed than this to escape the earth's gravitational pull. Seven miles per second. More fuel, please.

Reading teaches me the answers to the problems I haven't had yet, or to problems I didn't even know how to describe. And when I feel less alone with what troubles me, it is easier to find solutions. A book to me is like a friend, a shelter, advice, an argument with someone who cares enough to argue with me for a better answer than the one we both already have. Books aren't just a door to another world-each book is part of a door to the whole world, a door that always has more behind it.

the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure and success.

Did you ever see a bee lying drunk on a rose? Lost in the petal, so close you can't see its tiny burrowing. In this way, I hang as I can. As close as I can.

The night is a wonderful country to rule.

After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts.

A novel, should it survive, protects what a missile can't.

books were still to me as they had been when I found them: the only magic.

Write fiction about your life and pay with your life, at least three times. Here is the ax.

My first novel was not the first one I started. It was the first one I finished.

believing trouble is gone forever is the beginning of a special kind of trouble.

Your imagination needs o be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.

Your imagination needs to be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.

You could mistake your ability to go this far for strength. So you go on. Strength is admirable, after all, and you are ashamed of everything else about yourself. This endurance at least — this you can admire.

51. What if the novel in you is one you yourself would never read? A beach novel, a blockbuster, a long, windy, character-driven literary drama that ends sadly? What if the one novel in you is the opposite of your idea of yourself?