110+ Amy Tan Quotes On Writing, Culture And Creative

Amy Tan is an American novelist best known for her 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. She was born in Oakland, California to Chinese immigrant parents and her work often focuses on the relationships between Chinese American women and their immigrant mothers. Tan's work has been translated into 35 languages and she has written several other novels, essays, and a memoir. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Amy Tan on writing, culture, creative.

Top 10 Amy Tan Quotes

1. I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.
2. If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.
3. So sad! This is the saddest part when you lose someone you love- that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost?
4. I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.
5. I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength..."strongest wind cannot be seen."
6. Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.
7. Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.
8. From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.
9. Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.
10. Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.

Amy Tan Short Quotes

• Memory feeds imagination.
• Chaos is the penance for leisure.
• That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
• Words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them.
• It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.
• You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.
• Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
• In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
• too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.
• Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.

Amy Tan Quotes About Writing

I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. — 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. — Amy Tan

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. — Amy Tan

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. — Amy Tan

You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modernink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn. — Amy Tan

We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin. — Amy Tan

I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me. — Amy Tan

You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.' Or 'I'll write like this because it will impress that critic.' — Amy Tan

In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward. — Amy Tan

Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking. — Amy Tan

Amy Tan Quotes About Life

How do I create something out of nothing? And how do I create my own life? I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths. — Amy Tan

That is the nature of endings, it seems. They never end. When all the missing pieces of your life are found, put together with glue of memory and reason, there are more pieces to be found. — Amy Tan

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

God, life changes faster than you think. — Amy Tan

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. — Amy Tan

That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do. — Amy Tan

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

So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life. — Amy Tan

If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I had no worries, fears, or desires, when my life seemed as soft and lovely as lying inside a cocoon of rose silk. — Amy Tan

The life we receive is not always what we choose. — Amy Tan

Amy Tan Quotes About Write

I think we often write because we feel a loneliness, and people read for the same reason, and then they come away feeling a little less lonely. — Amy Tan

You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable. — Amy Tan

I AM A PERSON WHO THINKS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE SPIRIT WHEN I WRITE. I THINK ABOUT WHAT CAN'T BE KNOWN AND ONLY IMAGINED. I OFTEN SENSE A SPIRIT OR FORCE OR MEANING BEYOND MYSELF. I LEAVE IT OPEN AS TO WHAT THE SPIRIT IS, BUT I CONTINUE TO MAKE GUESSES. — Amy Tan

Amy Tan Quotes About People

Shanghainese people are good negotiators, they're very persistent, and you grow up in an atmosphere like that - very competitive. That becomes part of your personality, Shanghai personality becomes part of yours. — Amy Tan

There are a lot of people who think that's what's needed to be successful is always being right, always being careful, always picking the right path. — Amy Tan

We are the kind of people who obsess over one word... but we have only one shot to get it right in concert. It was hard the first time I practiced with them. I was so nervous that my vocal chords were paralyzed for about a half-hour. — Amy Tan

You have to be your own person. You can't let people's opinions determine how you think about yourself. There's a difference between identity and self-identity. — Amy Tan

...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us. — Amy Tan

If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too? — Amy Tan

But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people - men, women and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead. — Amy Tan

I have survivor skills. Some of that is superficial - what I present to people outwardly - but what makes people resilient is the ability to find humour and irony in situations that would otherwise overpower you. — Amy Tan

People there only dream that it is China, because if you are Chinese you can never let go of China in your mind. — Amy Tan

I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me. — Amy Tan

Amy Tan Quotes About Hope

With each passing day, I didn't lose hope. I fought to have more. — Amy Tan

We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate. — Amy Tan

Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever. — Amy Tan

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. — Amy Tan

It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want. — Amy Tan

With hope, a mind is always free. — Amy Tan

Hope is the adrenalin of the soul. — Amy Tan

I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations. — Amy Tan

There's no hope. There's no reason to keep trying. Because you must. This is not hope. Not reason. This is your fate. This is your life, what you must do. — Amy Tan

Amy Tan Famous Quotes And Sayings

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. — Amy Tan

And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. -Rose — Amy Tan

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

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. — Amy Tan

I was punched breathless by the strongest emotions I have ever felt and they are now stored in my intuition as a writer. — Amy Tan

I love my daughter. She and I have shared my body. There is a part of her mind that is a part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since. — Amy Tan

The muse appears at the point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the lanuage is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as thought the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine. — Amy Tan

Then she told me why a tiger is gold and black. It has two ways. The gold side leaps with its fierce heart. The black side stands still with cunning, hiding its gold between the trees, seeing and not being seen, waiting patiently for things to come. I did not learn to use my black side until after the bad man left me. — Amy Tan

My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the world of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco. — Amy Tan

Mothers have the huge influence, and I feel like they're always teaching us from the day we're born what to be afraid of, what to be cautious of, what we should like and what we should look like. Then we spend half of our life trying to be not like them, and then we reach another part of our lives where we see these things we can't get rid of. — Amy Tan

You don't care what people think. You don't see your beloved's faults, the slight stinginess, the bit of carelessness, the occasional streak of meanness. You don't mind that he is beneath you socially, educationally, financially, and morally--that's the worst, I think, deficient morals. (Saving Fish From Drowning) — Amy Tan

I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix? — Amy Tan

Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everyone else want best quality. You thinking different. — Amy Tan

Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess." - Ch. 5 — Amy Tan

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

I saw what I had been fighting for: it was for me, a scared child. — Amy Tan

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

It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate. — Amy Tan

My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A's from the time I was in kindergarten. — Amy Tan

I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes. — Amy Tan

I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind. -Lindo — Amy Tan

What is a secret wish?" "It is what you want but cannot ask. — Amy Tan

I began to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid. — Amy Tan

For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds. — Amy Tan

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant. — Amy Tan

And I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good. — Amy Tan

I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left. — Amy Tan

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

Among writers, if you don't have a therapist, it's like saying you don't keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It's a natural accompaniment. — Amy Tan

Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain. — Amy Tan

You see what power is holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them. — Amy Tan

But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. -Ying Ying — Amy Tan

My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of. — Amy Tan

I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control. — Amy Tan

We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others. — Amy Tan

We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. -Suyuan — Amy Tan

And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song. — Amy Tan

Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward. — Amy Tan

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house. — Amy Tan

And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood. — Amy Tan

For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me. — Amy Tan

But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better. -Jing-mei — Amy Tan

On the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother's case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow. — Amy Tan

I have always known a thing before it happens. — Amy Tan

Dementia was like a truth serum. — Amy Tan

And below the heimongmong, all along the ground, were weeds already spilling out over the edges, running wild in every direction. — Amy Tan

My mother had a look on her face that I'll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate. — Amy Tan

I take a few quick sips. "This is really good." And I mean it. I have never tasted tea like this. It is smooth, pungent, and instantly addicting. "This is from Grand Auntie," my mother explains. "She told me 'If I buy the cheap tea, then I am saying that my whole life has not been worth something better.' A few years ago she bought it for herself. One hundred dollars a pound." "You're kidding." I take another sip. It tastes even better. — Amy Tan

I felt like a rich vagabond who had passed through the world paving my way with gold fairy dust, then realizing too late that the path disintegrated as soon as I passed over it. — Amy Tan

When you already believe something, how can you suddenly stop? When you are a loyal friend, how can you no longer be one? — Amy Tan

All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. -Ying Ying — Amy Tan

My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have. — Amy Tan

There are never complete answers. Or rather, if there is an answer, it is to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything. — Amy Tan

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

Love is tricky. It is never mundane or daily. You can never get used to it. You have to walk with it, then let it walk with you. You can never balk. It moves you like the tide. It takes you out to sea, then lays you on the beach again. Today's struggling pain is the foundation for a certain stride through the heavens. You can run from it but you can never say no. It includes everyone. — Amy Tan

A mother is always the beggining. She is how things begin. — Amy Tan

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember? — Amy Tan

Yesterday my daughter said to me, 'My marriage is falling apart.' And now all she can do is watch it falling. — Amy Tan

I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn’t know what that was. I knew only what it wasn’t. The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan — Amy Tan

My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female. — Amy Tan

While it is good to speak well, it is better to speak the truth. — Amy Tan

Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit. — Amy Tan

Life Lessons by Amy Tan

1. Amy Tan's works often explore the complexities of intergenerational relationships, highlighting the importance of understanding and respecting different cultural values.
2. Through her stories, Tan emphasizes the power of resilience and the strength of familial bonds, showing how adversity can be overcome through perseverance and love.
3. Her novels also emphasize the importance of self-expression and the courage to pursue one's passions, despite the obstacles and difficulties that may arise.