Amy Tan Quotes

I lost and I didn't die. I still had my health, family and people who loved me.

A lot of people don't see, when we lose and go through tough times, how upset and disappointed we are.

It's sad, something coming to an end. It cracks you open, in a way - cracks you open to feeling. When you try to avoid the pain, it creates greater pain.

I know some people that have gone through serious struggles. People that were close to me, and I've seen some terrible things about people who lose it. So I think that type of pain is something that's human and that, actually, can help us look at ourselves a little bit.

I am far more comfortable with failure than I ever will be with success.

They say the death of a parent puts you in time because that means there's now no generation standing between you and ordinary death: you're next. I don't buy it.

When 'Friday Night Lights' finished, I cried for a day. I have a problem.

It is because my dad died suddenly that I became an actor. I thought, I'm going to make money doing this thing I enjoy.

In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.

It is true that I have had heartache and tragedy in my life. These are things none of us avoids. Suffering is the price of being alive.

You have people come into your life shockingly and surprisingly. You have losses that you never thought you'd experience. You have rejection and you have learn how to deal with that and how to get up the next day and go on with it.

The emotional stuff is the biggest challenge, for me to access that. As life passes, you encounter difficulties and tragedies, and so it becomes easier. 'Carnivale' required that of me, and it was really hard.

I'm not great at dealing with death, I have to say. I find death very hard: my mum, my dad, Sid Vicious. I'm not a monster; I feel it and it scares me. One death at a time, please, is all my heart will bear.

I've got over so much. Mum wouldn't want anything to come into my life that would make me fragile again.

I've always been more interested in what happens after the bad thing has happened - the fallout of the bad thing, when people are already damaged. I'm less interested in seeing people when they're fine and following their journey to becoming damaged.

Cancer is a very sad thing, but you can always take something from every experience.

People say that to me and I think what unites all my characters is that they are hurt; it's most accurate to say I play characters that are hurt but are responding to their environment.

Both my parents died on the young side. My father was 45, and my mother was 61, so cancer's affected me in a big way.

When people go through tragic circumstances, it's not that there is no love there, but it's so hard to deal with and sometimes the gap starts to happen.

If you are playing in 'Charley's Aunt,' and your favourite aunt died that lunchtime, you'll still have to go on the stage and play 'Charley's Aunt.'

Firemen have a culture of death. There are rituals, carefully constructed for the living, to process the dead.

It is devastating, losing a parent. I don't really know what the effect is, but I suppose people might call me an ambitious man, and I'd say that an ambitious man is a damaged man.

How do people move on after they've lost the love of their life? It's a really interesting thing to look at. It happens to people every day: you see people... even in the worst, most war-torn places, people get up and continue with their lives. And it's a fascinating thing about human nature. That ability to just continue on.

I was so angry at God for taking my father from me that I marched up to my mother before the funeral and told her I was going to quit nursing school. I just wanted to stop living.

Horrible things happen all our lives; we all experience loss and death and trauma. Usually, most people, I think, we just get on with it. We don't have a whole soliloquy in the middle of something.