Quotes from Jenny Zhang

As a child, I would go days without speaking, and then suddenly I would scream until everyone was looking at me.

I think Lena Dunham, the public figure, is - I hate the word 'brand,' but I'm going to use it - it's such a brand that is so tethered to her public persona and to 'Girls', but also this progressive politics that she's been more vocal about.

Once I decided I was happy with something, I'd try to send it off into the world, and either someone would want it exactly as it was, or it would remain in my notebook/laptop, and no one would ever see it. This is probably why I didn't work with an editor until I was 26. The solipsism!

It's weird for me to say I'm lucky when I can't go into a bookstore and have more than five choices if I want to read something about Asian-American characters.

I grew up in a Chinese American enclave where the person who lived down the street had literally lived down the street from my mother in Shanghai.

Early in my life, without any supporting evidence, I fretted over what I believed was my fate: accidentally becoming an international pop star. The pages of my diary were filled with hypothetical ethical dilemmas.

From its very inception, Lenny Letter set out to create a supportive, positive, inclusive space on the Internet that does not shy away from complexity and nuance.

I'm surely not the only one to notice we employ metaphors to make sense of the news. I always like to take note of who hides their origins and who shows them off.

That's what people expect: They don't want to read a slight novel. People don't want to waste their time on anything less than 'great.'

Shanghai, the city where I was born and spent my first four and a half years. It's not necessarily the most pleasant or most comforting place, but I have blood memory there, my core was formed there, so I need to go back often, or else I become empty, lost, without meaning.

The historical legacy of 'The Best American Poetry' is they've had very few editors who were not white. They've had very few instances where they've selected poems by non-white poets.

I'd behave savagely if I had access to Bjoerk's closet.

Coming out of the closet doesn't always mean liberation.

Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me - an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American - there were limits.

I really had to develop a core. I had to figure out, at my core as a writer, what did I value? What was I about? And I had to love it and take pleasure in it.

In my mind, scatological writing is a core of the English canon.

I think being a writer is being heavily attuned to the absolute absurdity of things you take for granted, and I think that having actual parents who lived through the Cultural Revolution who are also interested in literature, they're also very attuned to those moments.

White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it.

Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who founded Lenny Books together, also happen to have exquisite reading tastes - from obscure small press poetry chapbook to dishy memoirs to literary novels - and so it's a real honor that they've chosen to announce their imprint with my stories.

I think it was really important for me before I 'debuted myself' in front of the world to have a private life with my imagination and my writing for several years. That also made it so I didn't feel desperate for someone to find me.

I hadn't ever worked with an 'editor' until I was 26 - although that could be partly chalked up to the MFA vs. NYC thing, where I came up through institutions that encouraged writers to write privately for a long, long time and not sully themselves with concerns about audience or the business side of writing.

The year my mom worked as a secretary at an apparel company in midtown, she would often come home in tears because she had mistakenly called her boss by another coworker's name. 'You know how it is,' my father said, 'they all look the same. It's not your mom's fault. There's just no telling them apart. Same high nose and deep-set eyes.'

Even when I speak English to my parents, I'll say an English word differently to my Chinese parents and friends than I do to my English-speaking friends - you know, I'll pronounce 'McDonald's' differently, because it feels right, and that's what I'm used to.

I know I am not the first woman to ask this, but how can I be both damaged and loveable? How do I become the protagonist of a story?