Min Jin Lee

“We need to recognize how difficult and important being a mother is.”

“Clothing was magic. Casey believed this. She would never admit this to her classmates in any of her women's studies courses, but she felt that an article of clothing could change a person... Each skirt, blouse, necklace, or humble shoe said something - certain pieces screamed, and others whispered seductively, but no matter, she experienced each item's expression keenly, and she loved this world. every article suggested an image, a life, a kind of woman, and Casey felt drawn to them." (Free Food For Millionaires, p.41).”

“For me, writing a historical novel was really hard. I love history as a subject and majored in it in college. I think, in a way, my training made it worse for me because I knew how important it was to focus on document-based analysis, and I really didn't want to get stuff wrong.”

“I don't hold any contempt for people who are practicing law. I know how hard it is, I know how hard they work, and I know some of them who are so unhappy with it.”

“I like making things. I enjoy putting words and images on a blank space. There should be joy in the writing itself because parts of it are so challenging and lonesome. I take great pleasure in reading, researching, and interviewing. I enjoy forming my sentences and revising them to make them clean.”

“There's a lot of freedom in failure, and I can see that now.”

“If I meet a wise person, I think, 'Yes, tell me more about parenting, about marriage, about how to stay in love. Tell me more about how to be a decent person living in a world that's filled with chaos.'”

“Koreans are worried about the Japanese right-wing people, who tend to be against foreigners. But the Koreans in Japan aren't even foreigners. They are essentially culturally Japanese. If a family has lived in Japan for three generations, it's absurd to see them as foreigners.”

“As an artist, my wheelhouse is 19th-century literature. I want to write realist novels in a Victorian sense, and the writers I admire in that style tend to do omniscient narration.”

“I had thought that Tokyo would be like New York City, but it wasn't. I'd imagined that they'd be similar in their bustle and noise level, but, in fact, Tokyo is a very calm metropolis. The bright lights and hectic night-life images so often found in advertisements and Western media do not reflect every day Japan.”

“I believe there is meaning in life. I believe there is good and evil.”

“People often think of America as a classless society, but, of course, that isn't true. Within immigrant communities, there's an enormous distinction of class, depending on who your parents are, and that kind of thing comes out really quick in things like marriage and interpersonal relationships.”

“I had liver disease. I'm completely cured now, but I thought about if I died from liver cancer, what my life would look like. I followed this wish of being a fiction writer.”

“One of the nice things about getting older is that you come to understand that you can integrate multiple aspects of your life together. When you're young, you think everything has to be binary, as that's exactly how you feel at that age.”

“I have romantic ideas about home and what it should mean.”

“I thought, 'Nobody wants this book, and I'm an idiot for having worked on it so hard.' But to succeed in writing, you must be willing to look stupid for a long time. 'Pachinko' took so long because I got it wrong so many times.”

“We all want to be affiliated with success. It's the impulse of people who have been excluded, and Koreans have been excluded from lots of parties.”

“I have accepted the fact that I don't work very quickly, that I have been rejected a lot as a writer, and that what I do is unusual, so I just have to accept the terms and that it's going to take longer. It is what it is.”

“I think that if you're a writer and a woman, then you have to take humiliation very well.”

“I moved to Queens, New York, when I was seven and a half. I went to middle school in a foreign country, but I had so many different kinds of Americans push me along and encourage me. I was very odd. I didn't talk very well. We were poor, and we didn't have any connections, but people showed up and pushed me along.”