Amy Tan Quotes

I wasn't a good rule-breaker when I was younger.

Negativity sells. I have been labelled a rebel. If I had been one, would I have got married at 23? Would I have been a straight A student?

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

I didn't try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.

It's such a paradox. You come from this place where you want fame; you don't want to be bourgeois, but you want to be successful. You want to be accepted, but you also want to be going against the grain. You want to be on the outside, but you want to be on the inside.

Rules are simply obstacles to be jumped, like in a horse race: higher and higher every time.

The only way to rebel against my mother was to be totally normal.

Our success just flies in the face of critics or people who would rather that we just failed... because we didn't fit into the style of the times or our lyrics were too upfront or too earnest or whatever.

There are two unpardonable sins in this world -- success and failure.

The only people who ever called me a rebel were people who wanted me to do what they wanted.

I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

I basically became a cheerleader because I had a very strict mom. That was my way of being a bad girl.

Breaking accepted rules does bring people together.

I'm such a Goody Two-shoes, but I get a vicarious thrill at someone sticking it to the Man.

I was tired of playing the goodie-two-shoes.

I'm of the establishment but anti-establishment.

I think of myself as unconventional, I guess. I maybe always had a problem with authority, like a stubbornness about what's expected - despite wanting to get some recognition through performing - but also not always wanting to do the expected thing.

The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.

I just felt like I was making people angry because I wouldn't wear the frilly bows.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

I had a writing professor at Brandeis who told me I'd never make it - and when I sold my first novel a few years later, I sent him a copy!

You either go along with the system - conform to what is expected to be a hit - or you have very tough going.

Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for.

Since I became part of the zeitgeist, I've been called a sellout many times.