For books I want to keep reading, it’s definitely the voice. It must be a voice I’ve never heard before, and it must have its own particular intelligence. By ‘voice,’ I don’t mean vernacular. It has to have its own particular history and world that it inhabits. Amy Tan Read Quote
I don’t steer clear of genres. I simply haven’t steered myself toward some of them. Amy Tan Read Quote
I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that’s what I do as a writer. Amy Tan Read Quote
I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person. Amy Tan Read Quote
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn’t have encouragement, but I didn’t have discouragement, because I don’t think anybody knew what that meant. Amy Tan Read Quote
My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A’s from the time I was in kindergarten. Amy Tan Read Quote
I went to an exhibition at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum about Shanghai, about how courtesans had been influential in bringing western culture to Shanghai. I bought a book and in it saw this striking group of women in a photograph called ‘The Ten Beauties of Shanghai’. Amy Tan Read Quote
I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn’t understand her English, because she was Chinese. Amy Tan Read Quote
I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression. Amy Tan Read Quote
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. Amy Tan Read Quote
