Chang-Rae Lee Quotes

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

I purposely adopted a style in my storytelling wherein I don't have to explain everything or why the story is moving in a particular way.

In my mind, there's usually a fairly definitive kind of narrative when I write. But I don't want to enforce that on other people. I think that's why I like using metaphor so much.

I don't know what the definition of a short story is, and I don't even care to answer that question. That's something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it's a story.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.

Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.

I never wrote my books especially for children.

The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.

In Victorian fiction, there would be a chapter at the end devoted to righting all of the wrongs. I thought to right all of the wrongs would be too glib. I thought it would be better to lull the reader into thinking that is the way it would work, but then not to do that.

In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.

When you write something you know, you're making a story that will work, whether or not there's bits taken. It's always funny to me when people say, 'Well, it's clearly autobiographical,' and I say, 'Well, how do you know my autobiography?' Certainly, there are things that are connected, but I just think it's a very interesting assumption.

A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them.

I try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that it enables the readers' creativity and interaction with the book.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

I intentionally approached each story in 'Killing and Dying' in a different way, and that includes the writing process.

Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.

I'm not standing above the audience trying to manipulate them as a puppet master or a trickster; I'm inside the story I'm writing and making and thinking about things very seriously and feeling very deeply at times, and trying to translate that into a narrative.

I like to describe my characters as though they were all trapped in a glass box.