Amy Tan Quotes

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

You learn a lot about yourself just by writing it down.

I do a lot of journaling.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.

Writing is a really good first step toward that goal of knowing yourself.

I try to say something about the human condition whenever I can when I'm lucky.

I like to write when I feel I'm the real me.

I used to love writing in my journal.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

I think I can see more clearly now - about how the pattern of past experiences has shaped who I am and the characters I have played - and I'm grateful for that.

I've kept a journal since I was 15. And I feel like it's been crucial to who I've become and trying to maintain stuff, a sense of who I am just for myself and not for other people.

When I'm out having the experiences, that's exactly what I'm doing: having the experiences. Then I can later reflect and write.

I've always kept a journal and brought storytelling into my teaching.

My only way of processing anything for me is by writing.

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

People who keep journals have life twice

I rejected the word humorist for a long time because I thought that it meant you had, like, a cardigan sweater with patches on the elbows, but now I'm old and I do. I grew into that word. I think at heart, all this time, I've been a diarist. I'm not ashamed of it.

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.

One of the other reasons for writing this book [My Beloved World] was to hold on to the person you first met. More of the world knows about me now and follows me in a way that never happened before. I didn't want me, the inside of me, to change. Because I liked Sonia, the Sonia who has been. So another reason for writing the book was to hold on to that - whatever the best in Sonia was, to try to capture it.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

How can you spend hours every day trying in small ways to figure out who you are, then have a near-stranger give you a sentence of yourself that says it better than you ever could?

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

I have had fun being who I became, so to speak.