Quotes from Michelle Zauner

I started going to chess clubs when I was in fourth grade. From fourth grade to seventh grade, I was in chess club.

I used to shower every day, but I've been trying to shower less frequently for my hair health.

I quit music and decided I was going to work a 9-to-5 job in advertising... which in New York City is more like, 8-to-7.

Persimmons are pretty present in a lot of Asian cultures, as gifts that you give to people.

I had seen an image of these hanging persimmons that are dried during the winter and turned into sweet, dried fruit. And I really like the idea of this very bitter, hard fruit before it's ripened - on display and slowly maturing and turning sweeter and letting its environment impact it. It felt like a very fitting metaphor for where I've come from.

I was completely shocked - two Grammy nominations. I've said it out loud to myself about 100 times.

I love kitchenware. I'm very frugal and I don't buy a lot of things, but I'm frivolous when it comes to buying groceries and kitchenware.

But for a song like 'Paprika,' I typically feel like I need to experience anguish a lot of the time to feel like I've put in enough hard work.

I was always being told to calm down, to chill out, to slow down. I was a bad toddler, I was a bad child, I was a bad teenager.

When I was growing up, I didn't realize that the idiosyncrasies of my mother's character had something to do with our culture. After growing up and reflecting and making more Asian-American friends, I learned that a lot this is something a lot of people grow up with.

I never made kimchi before. I talk about my first time making it in the book, and I'm not a big baker, but I imagine it's like a similar kind of feeling for a lot of people who are bakers where it's just something that takes time. There's so much space to be reflective and meditative.

I was very much a work horse my whole life.

I love food. It's been such a huge part of my life. In a way, I think I didn't even realize it until I wrote this book. Food brings me this great joy.

A lot of cookbooks also have incredible food writing, even though I feel like a lot of cookbook authors don't necessarily identify with being writers.

My favorite thing that I'm learning, in particular, is that the type of love between an immigrant parent and their child growing up in America is a particular nuanced type of love.

Initially it was so important for me to be credited as a producer, play all these instruments and be the sole writer on everything. I think especially as a woman, you want to be taken seriously as a musician, as a producer.

I really love MFK Fisher's food writing, and obviously Anthony Bourdain's food writing is exceptional, in particular 'A Cook's Tour'. I really love the short story that he writes about revisiting the coastal town in France of his childhood and the memories that he has of his father.

The biggest takeaway from a memoir is that you have to play fair. Within the first draft, I was writing very angrily because I had a lot of resentment and a lot to process. Through revision is where a lot of learning happened and a lot of forgiveness happened.

A lot of water and air signs that are just like, trying to have a lowkey conversation. Fire sign enters the room with no chill. I just have no chill.

I feel like there are a number of indie artists... as they grow, it makes the most sense for them to pivot to pop, to become bigger artists. And I feel like that's when people get really bad, you know? I didn't want to fall into that pitfall.

My records have a lot of collaborators on them, and when you're writing a book, it's a very insular process that's very confusing and dark. It's a lot of writing and rewriting in a way that I don't do so much when I'm writing songs.

I only wanted to play the guitar so I could write music. As soon as I learned my first three chords I wrote my first song. It was just a tool to get me to be able to do the thing that I wanted to do.

I got married two weeks before my mom passed away, and then a year later, I was receiving some kind of artistic success that I'd never had. All of these really beautiful things happened where I was in love and I had a career I loved, but it was all kind of under the shadow of this really dark and painful thing.

I'm a huge fan of the Korean attitude toward service and infrastructure, which is shaped by a preference for speed and efficiency, values I truly yearn for in the US.