Amy Tan Quotes

I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to myself with time, not only in terms of my career choices, but the choices I make within one role or performance. I used to compose characters that were farther from me, but I find now that I like to craft a subtle composition, a subtle change in your essence.

One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.

I think that those of us who are ordinary disappear easily into the backdrop of life and we take things for granted. We often wake up in our lives and wonder how we got there. But the characters I create, the people I am drawn to, are quite extraordinary (and not always in wholesome ways), and they offer us the chance to understand who we really are and how we became who we are.

Every character is a part of you and a part of the character that you are going to evolve into that you are not yet.

What we do belongs to what we are; and what we are is what becomes of us.

Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation.

I have a clear view of 12 years of history of my inner self. First the cramped self, that self with big blinkers, then the disappearance of the blinkers and the self, now gradually the reemergence of a self without blinkers.

We are apt to think that everything that happens to us is to be turned into useful teaching; it is to be turned into something better than teaching, into character. We shall find that the spheres God brings us into are not meant to teach us something but to make us something.

How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all?

I think the most interesting thing about any story is how people change. That's usually a struggle, because change is pretty much an uncomfortable thing.

Identity issues are hardwired into the way I think about character - it's almost as if I can't get away from them even if I want to.

I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me.

We all have a wrong idea of ourselves. I am always changing, and I will continue to change. So, I never try to describe, define or judge myself.

...Stop blaming me, thinking I'm the problem. If you think I'm the problem, then you have to change me. If you realize that you're the problem, then you can change yourself, learn something and grow wiser. Most people want everyone else in the world to change themselves. Let me tell you, it's easier to change yourself than everyone else.

When you gaze into souls, it's something you should update periodically, because souls can change.

If someone is self-aware, then they can always continue to grow. If they're not self-aware, I think it's harder for them to evolve or adapt beyond who they already are.

The ordinary focus on what they're getting. The extraordinary think about who they're becoming.

The real preparation for education is a study of one's self. The training of the teacher...is something far more than a learning of ideas. It includes the training of character; it is a preparation of the spirit.

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

Until we see what we are, we cannot take steps to become what we should be.

The 'Inside-Out' approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self, with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves recedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.

You cannot let go of anything if you cannot notice that you are holding it. Admit your 'weaknesses' and watch them morph into your greatest strengths.

Character begins to form at the first pinch of anxiety about ourselves.

Every single experience, every single thing that's happened in my life, struggle, obstacle, trials and tribulations, I think they've all molded me to become the character and the person who I am.

Before you can do something, you must first be something.