Alexander Chee Quotes.

1. "Writers aren't born, they're made--from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage."
- Quote by Alexander Chee

2. "I resented the idea of being talented. I couldn’t respect it — in my experience, no one else did. Being called talented at school had only made me a target for resentment. I wanted to work. Work, I could honor."
- Quote by Alexander Chee

3. "PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success."
- Quote by Alexander Chee

4. "So then, sometimes you are not out of ideas. Sometimes you are afraid of the idea you have. This idea, it is an imposter. It will ravage your life. Undo all your hard work. Destroy you. You’re sure of it. At the least it will humiliate you. Are you really not inspired or are you afraid of being the person who will write the thing that will come if you sit down with the idea you have? Who do you need to love you so much that you will hide this idea from you and act like it doesn’t exist? Which is to say, sometimes you need to be destroyed. The person you are is in the way and the person you will be is waiting on the other side of the shell that you call you."
- Quote by Alexander Chee

5. "Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA."
- Quote by Alexander Chee

6. "My grandfather knows about hauntings, it occurs to me now. Here was where he knew his sisters, here was what he remembered, every day, in his Imperial school, as the Japanese grammar spread inside him, as he learned the language of the people who took his sisters and destroyed them. All his thoughts come to him in Japanese first, his dreams in Japanese also... I think of how every single thing he says in Korean comes across a pause where the Japanese is stilled and the Korean brought forward. Each part of speech a rescue"
- Alexander Chee, Edinburgh

7. "Everything is already moving so very fast, but you need a great deal more speed than this to escape the earth's gravitational pull. Seven miles per second. More fuel, please."
- Alexander Chee, Edinburgh

8. "Hate is love on fire, set out to burn like a flare on the side of the road. It says, stop here. Something terrible has happened. Envy is like, the skin you're in burns. And the salve is someone else's skin."
- Alexander Chee, Edinburgh

9. "There is light suddenly everywhere, the light of your life speaking to you. What it tells you is almost the same as what happened. Never mind that almost isn’t good enough; it’s all you have."
- Alexander Chee, Edinburgh

10. "There is a part of you, you see now, that is reckless. A part of you that still always wants to die but never really wants to go after it. So it makes mistakes instead. Or it says, when trouble comes in and has lemonade, I wonder what this will look like. If I sit still. If I do nothing."
- Alexander Chee, Edinburgh