Amy Tan Quotes

I think writing gives me creative freedom.

I work in a business environment forty hours a week, and writing is what I do to unwind. It allows me to transport myself to a happy place where I can indulge my hopes, beliefs, aspirations and fantasies. It also allows me to live and breathe a topic for eighteen months while I'm researching and writing.

When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.

We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.

Writing was my route to creative expression, and I needed to write about the things that interested me.

As long as I can remember, I was drawing or trying to create something.

Sometimes I like to draw.

I know I can always draw, but I actually love the writing the most.

I'm always writing or playing because that is my life.

I get to do what I love every day. I get to crawl into someone else's head and I love that.

When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both - I never know what's going to happen.

I've always been concerned with my sculpture. The drawings I do at night at home to relax. And for a long time, I just gave them to friends or my wife and didn't really show them.

Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.

If I find out I have to write today and nothing else, that’s a perfect day. I know a lot of people who are great at it and make it look easy who are tortured and miserable people. Writing for me is perfect peace.

I started drawing at a very young age. Writing a story wasn't satisfying, but to actually draw our own world - it's like controlling your own dreams.

I used to love to make things - you couldn't drag me away for dinner because I was always writing a story or something.

I've been drawing all my life, just as a hobby, without really having shows or anything. It's just an agreeable thing to do, and I recommend it to everybody.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

I love writing and directing because it's great therapy. Every project I've done, there's been a personal connection.

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

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

I don't care what I do - act, stand-up, write, direct - it doesn't matter as long as I'm being creative and it's good work.

I don't need the bread, but it's nice to do something creative.

I want to get within myself and write. I really, really want to write.