Amy Tan Quotes

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.

I like people who tell stories. I like storytellers. A lot of my songs are misconceived as being auto-biographical when they're not because I write in the first person.

I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.

Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.

Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

In writing, I search for believability, simplicity and emotional impact.

I think storytelling is a thing of beauty, and also very difficult. It's a craft you have to continue to work at.

I'm not a good crime writer. I'm not good with plots... so I have to do something else.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They're the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth of this or that character does not matter to me.

If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

Good storytelling appeals to me - good writing.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

I'm not as good a writer as I'd like to be; therefore, I like to use images to tell stories.

I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.

As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.

Writing is incidental to my primary objective, which is spinning a good yarn. I view myself as a storyteller more than a writer. The story - and hence the extensive research that goes into each one of my books - is much more important than the words that I use to narrate it.

That's always the most productive research - research into tone, into voice. Facts are nice, too, but facts are more raw material than creative inspiration.