Chang-Rae Lee Quotes

I don't feel I have to be Jackson Browne. Still, I like to say something.

You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.

My work is trying to at least define myself on my own terms, and then if other people enjoy things that's a lovely addition.

Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don't worry about whether you're "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

I don't think of myself as Scottish or lesbian when I sit down and write. I am glad I have broken out of that limited audience.

I'm such a strong believer in making yourself happy. Almost in a selfish way. There are a lot of trends, and obviously you can get swept up into them. But I feel like if you just write songs you love, it can have trap beats in it or whatever's going on in the moment, but you don't stop loving songs.

Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can't be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you.

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.

I'll never be August Wilson - but what I can be is more of myself.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

Where he tells you exactly how he views the world - just very straight Kanye, honesty that definitely gets your creativity and strong opinions out on the floor. I think it helped me find myself.

You just get out there and be what you want to be. That's part of evolving and part of staying true to yourself - part of remaining alive in a real authentic, long-term sense creatively: not listening to what other people tell you to be.

Lena Dunham or Miranda July, those people are sort of thinking about their work in a slightly different way than I do, where their whole body is a seed of what they're creating. I can't imagine watching Miranda's movies with anybody else playing her role, she's so integral. But for me, it feels more like every story is really individual. If I thought of something else, or thought it should be my body representing it, I'd fold my body into it. But most of the time I'm writing to get something out of my body.

It was only until I started to be myself that the music started to flow and people started to listen. So, thank you guys...

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

I have never followed what people say it is 'fashionable'. I think that a woman must wear what fits her. That is why I created a style appropriated to my type and my artistical genre.

I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

You've got to be oblivious to other people, the push and pull of other people's opinions, the way other people measure success. It's then that you realize you are 100 percent who you are and you have to use that who-you-are 100 percent in order to create great things.

I don't think it is possible to give tips for finding one's voice; it's one of those things for which there aren't really any tricks or shortcuts, or even any advice that necessarily translates from writer to writer. All I can tell you is to write as much as possible.

-- and it occurred to me that people who don't talk about themselves are limiting their own potential. They think they're guarding themselves for some sort of abstract dange, but they're actually allowing other people to decide who they are and what they're like.

I just go in the studio and do what I love to do. People will be people, they'll come and go, they'll like you then not like you, I just try to stay true to myself first and that's what most important because that way when you are successful you can stand up and say look, I did it my way and I did it the way that I wanted to do it.

Right away, I knew I didn't want to have that look of other guys with long hair and bell-bottom pants, because everybody else had that look. I kind of adopted my boarding-school look, which made me stand out. Then the next thing you know, the first song on my first record is a song called "School Days." It's about going to the boarding school I went to. So then I just started to write about myself. The very first song I ever wrote was about a guy I met in a boatyard that we were working in. So I've always had this thing about sticking to more or less what I knew.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.