Amy Tan was born in California to Chinese immigrants. She is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, and The Bonesetter’s Daughter.
“When I was six or seven, I used to read a thesaurus searching for the words that meant exactly what I felt. And I could never find them.”
“Loneliness is the impetus for writing, because language is the best means we have to connect.”
“Generalizations are just not part of how I think. Stories begin with microscopic-level detail, in the particularities that make up each individual life.”
“No one really knows what it’s like to be you. So no one can tell you how you must understand the world.”
“I err on the side of going into too much detail when I do research and write. I abandon 95 percent of it. But I love it. It’s part of my writing process. I never consider it a waste of time.”
“As I write a story, I have to be open to all the possibilities of what these characters are thinking and doing and what might apply. For me, the best way to do this is writing longhand, the way I write the early drafts of a novel.”
“There’s so much chaos in my early drafts.”
“So much of writing, for me, is about being open — open to new ideas, open to other frameworks, open to details I don’t understand at first.”
Quotes taken from ‘Amy Tan’s Lonely, Pixel-by-Pixel Writing Method’ in The Atlantic, 10 December 2013.