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In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.

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 was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.

God, life changes faster than you think.

Amy Tan

Life

God

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.

Amy Tan

Luxury

Writer

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

Amy Tan

Mother

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

Amy Tan

Imagination

Ideas

I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.

Amy Tan

Bible

Respect

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

Amy Tan

Memory

Writer

I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.

Amy Tan

Fear

Failure

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.

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.