Min Jin Lee

“I find putting oneself out there difficult. I think writing and sharing writing require different skill sets. I want to be read, but it takes courage to ask someone to read your work.”

“Twenty-five million people who live in North Korea are denied freedom in every respect of their lives. In short, they are hostages. Imagine 25 million hostages.”

“His Presbyterian minster father had believed in a divine design, and Mozasu believed that life was like this game where the player could adjust the dials yet also expect the uncertainty of factors he couldn't control. He understood why his customers wanted to play something that looked fixed but which also left room for randomness and hope.”

“As a woman of colour, as a person who is a minority, I believe its important that other people know about my language and I don't necessarily have to explain. In the same way, when I read 19th-century literature and if I have to understand a Latin phrase or a French phrase, it is incumbent upon me to learn it.”

“I love most New England towns.”

“I find being an adult very difficult. Being an adult artist, Asian American, incredibly difficult. Or trying, anyway.”

“For me, whatever you write about should be worthy of your attention, worthy of your gifts. That's very important.”

“After I quit being a lawyer in '95, I was having a lot of trouble writing. Then I read somewhere that Willa Cather read a chapter of the Bible every day before she started work. I thought, 'Okay, I'll try it.' Before each writing session, I started to read the Bible like a writer, thinking about language, character, and themes.”

“We have huge holes in our education in the West. I think that we have little knowledge of Asian history. If you ask a well-educated, modern Western person about World War II, most will think that the theatre of war was only in Europe. But it's known that the Pacific War was going on concurrently, and we don't know anything about it.”

“Casey glanced at her plate again, recalling the posters of her elementary school lunchroom: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT. So, how much you ate indicated the quantity of your desire. Walter was also implying that how quickly you got your food revealed the likelihood of achieving your goals. She was in fact terribly hungry, but she'd pretended to be otherwise to be ladylike and had moved away from the table to be agreeable, and now she'd continue to be hungry" (Free Food For Millionaires, p.92.)”

“I think that what's bizarre to me about life is that sometimes you have to have everything taken away before you experience grace or before you actually recognize that grace can happen to you.”

“I think that the shame of being different is very painful for a lot of people.”

“A novel, especially a first novel, is... really an emotional autobiography. All these emotions I'm embarrassed at having had, I've written about.”

“Education is a beautiful, liberating thing, but I think that tying in education and status, and the need to do well at every cost, is toxic.”

“My father was born on Christmas Day in 1934. He grew up in what is now part of North Korea. When the Korean War began, my father was 16, and he found passage on an American refugee ship,thinking he'd be gone for just a few days, but he never saw his mother or his sister again.”

“One thing that struck me in my study of history is how people are excluded. I don't mean just racial minorities or women. Pretty much all poor people who don't have documents are excluded from history and its records. People who were illiterate usually didn't leave any primary documents.”