Amy tan

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer.

It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

I don't steer clear of genres. I simply haven't steered myself toward some of them.

I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.

The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.

At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing about emotional confusion with my mother related to our different beliefs. Hers was based in family...

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.