Chang-Rae Lee quotes:

In my teaching, I try to expose my students to the widest range of aesthetic possibilities, so I'll offer them stories from Anton Chekhov to Denis Johnson, from Flannery O'Connor to A.M. Homes, and perhaps investigating all that strange variation of beauty has rubbed off on me. Or perhaps that's why I enjoy teaching literature.

My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled.

Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe, I don't like proper dress while working. I like writing in pajama-like clothing, which eases and relaxes me and allows me to connect with the decidedly improper.

I don't believe complete assimilation is possible, at least not for anyone who has an active, open mind. Every step, every entry into the flows of existence can be seen as a beginning, a commencement of a brand new way of seeing oneself in the world. This is the case for everyone.

It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war.

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.

No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.

My writing day follows my family's day. I get a good few hours in the mornings when the kids are out of the house. And I don't work at night any more. I like to see my family.

I didn't leave Wall Street because the work was against my nature - I do have a pretty good head for numbers. I left because I had this love for writing.

After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the book would work, but to be honest, I think I knew it would never work, even as I was finishing it.

I remember when I was in art classes, I hated following the assignments. And I would get in trouble for doing something totally different or taking it in a weird direction.

Before I start my work in the morning, I need to have quickly browsed the entire paper, noting articles that I want to read during lunch.

One of the ready advantages of writing a road or quest story is that it mirrors the experience of writing a novel.

I think book clubs should read more contemporary poetry.

For me, that's always been one of the great charms of the first person: we gain access to a very personal, private kind of music.

What's fun about a dystopian novel is that we can enjoy and be entertained. But that world is only slightly different, right? It's familiar enough to be recognizable, and skewed enough to give us pause.

I don't like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can't go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises.

For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that passion makes us believe we can overleap any walls, obliterate whatever obstacles.

My parents - my mother, particularly - were very focused on our succeeding. I loved my parents, and was very grateful to them for everything, and I didn't want to disappoint them.

In my other books, things do happen, but they are kind of bookends to the real action, which for me was an exploration of consciousness. Not that I don't get into the consciousness of the people in 'The Surrendered,' but you could say there's not as much anxiety about it.

We grow up with this idea that we're all individual agents. We work, make our money, have our place to live and our satellite TV. But whether you like it or not, you need family or community.

I don't feel uncomfortable in America, but every once in a while, I'm reminded that people don't see me the way I see me. It doesn't change my life, but it gives me a consciousness about it.

Our tainted world looms within us, every one.

In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.

Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?

Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

A novel, even a social realist one, can't simply be a comprehensive rendering of what is. A novel requires a special angle or approach, whether in structure or language or theme, to justify itself.

I can put together a pretty decent meal from whatever happens to be in the refrigerator and the pantry. I like the challenge of this sort of improvisation, the rigor of limitation and sometimes having to take a risk.

Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap.

We know the point of the 2010 Census is to count us, one by one, to tally every last resident, but the massive project of course has more prying, if limited, interests.

We read and remember certain writers because they offer distinctive voices and perspectives, because they've given themselves over completely and passionately to their obsessions while vigorously ignoring everything else.

I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.

I often think that the prime directive for me as a teacher of writing is akin to that for a physician, which is this: do no harm.

I write on a computer. On breaks, I'll make myself green tea. I don't want something too caffeinated. I guess I don't believe in chemical enhancement of my writing. Just slight, but nothing crazy.

Even though I went to Exeter and Yale, and I enjoyed all the trappings of those places, I think at the same time - and maybe it's because I'm an immigrant kid and not white - there was always this other consciousness; that is, I was conscious of everything that was going on.

We arrived the way most emigrant families did. My father came first, and the rest of us - my mother, my sister and me - followed a year later.

For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.

So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you are at that moment, accrued all through time, so I accept that.

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.

I assumed just from being around, all these years, that people would immediately glom on to, Well, it's a departure, and it's a dystopian kind of thing, and that's natural, of course. But it's surprised me - not even surprised me, but it's pleased me - how much people have been responding to the way the book was written.

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

And it occurred to me that in this new millennial life of instant and ubiquitous connection, you don't in fact communicate so much as leave messages for one another, these odd improvisational performances, often sorry bits and samplings of ourselves that can't help but seem out of context. And then when you do finally reach someone, everyone's so out of practice or too hopeful or else embittered that you wonder if it would be better not to attempt contact at all.

I try to be aware of what I'm concerned about, aware of how I feel about myself in the world, aware of how I feel about the issues of the day, but I guess I don't want to write essays in my head about my craft and maybe it's because I teach and talk about craft of other writers as a reader. I feel the moment I start doing that is when it's going to kill me.

You can be affected by a person because of something particular they said or did but sometimes how a person was, a manner of being, that gets most deeply absorbed, and prompts you to revisit certain parts of your life with an enhanced perspective, flowing forward right up to now.

What if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted? And then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit? But you keep coming back for more?

I'd always wanted to write something about the Korean War because of my heritage. My father lost his brother during the war, and I fictionalized that episode, which was told to me very briefly without much detail.

We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears.

I had a visceral connection to the period [of Korean War]. By visceral I suppose I mean emotional. But every fiction requires so much that is not that so I did a lot of other research and a lot of thinking, a lot of struggling there.

To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.

What hasty preparations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we're sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we'll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equipped for the dawn.

For each of us has a perch on the tree. After we are gone, that perch is marked by a notch, permanent, yes, but with its edges muting over time, assuming the tree is ever growing. Years from now someone can see that you were here, or there, and although you had little conception or care for the wider branching, in the next life there might be a sigh of wonder at how quietly flourishing it all was, if never majestic.

Like most people, Im fascinated by characters who are completely flawed personalities, riven by anguish and doubt, and are psychologically suspect.

Most people dont think about race as much as I do. They dont have to.

Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap. It's like spelunking. You kind of create the right path for yourself. But, boy, are there so many points at which you think, absolutely, I'm going down the wrong hole here. And I can't get back to the right hole. I'm not going to be able to get this section back to the right hole - so I'm just going to have to cut it.

I did a lot of reading of first person accounts from Koreans and combatants and aid workers. And I spoke to relatives. A lot of wonderful photographs were made available to me from that period - 1950-1956 - and those were given to me by a Korean newspaper in Seoul. Ruined villages, refugees streaming through a river valley, GI's and orphans and orphanages, those tiny details that you can only see in a picture.

It's not that I wrote those details, but photos can give you the confidence that you have a real feel for the landscape. Then you can invent with a solid kind of faith, and recreate a feel and flavor of the time, and, one hopes, a tonality, a sense of that time having been lived by those characters.

All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference. Technically, I do enjoy the flashback! But not just for informational material.

I want the flashbacks to feel that once you're there they have their own unity, their own kind of atmospheric sensibility; I want the reader to be transported. The novel is a big, complicated, unknowable thing before it's written.

By definition it uses and plays and delights in time. It delights in the interlacing of chronologies and the consequences of that interlacing. And those have personal and psychological expressions in a character. Aside from other issues of writing, psychological characterization is what narrative can do best.

I think their pasts are treated with a voice that sees their role as those of innocents. That's reflected in the past time sequences. They're less "written."

When I'm describing wartime activities or violence I don't want to be too ornate, to prettify the picture. Once we trace them to the present, the prose becomes denser.

I'm more interested in the psychic intricacies that they build up and try to run away from, and how they self-construct. A lot of my work is about self-construction. Here, it's those folks who are deeply wounded and bewildered. They're not just victims of trauma; they've been shaken so forcefully that they don't quite know how or where to stand.

There is secrecy and betrayal but that's more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that's modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.

I think because of these big issues of life and death that maybe sex feels like a crass question. But for Christ sake, this is a book that is so interested in an elemental human condition. And one of the ideas about surrender is an erotic surrender, too. These folks are surrendered by destiny; they surrender to each other in certain moments, but there is a lot of erotic surrender.

Obviously loss of family is huge and critical, but I think really it's more about losing a sense of family. The horror of that kind of incompleteness. Writing this book, I tried not to think about my father, which does no one any good fictionally. I did try to imagine not just the horror of that moment, but the horror of having witnessed it, and the lifelong void. And I think that's what's so frightening.

I don't think that stuff is gone - I just don't want to dwell on it. There's a difference. As I said, I think we all have tendencies as writers, and I think we all have experience that we bring as readers to each project.

I did feel a little afraid, as you say, the complete liberty and "elasticity" of it. But I found that I liked some of the things that it availed me of in terms of emotion and tonal stuff. I came to find it appealing.

Yeah, and the language the "we" has, and the character the "we" has. Because that was the part of the book that I didn't plan out, but the part that I was most curious about as I was writing. You know what you're doing, but you're sometimes still sort of curious as you're writing it.

We can skip through a lot of the stuff people might ask about the writing of the book, and so their comments always start well, well down into the nitty-gritty.

I rarely talk about work with writers, and I love getting together with writers. I think writers are great to get together with, because we can talk about everything. I think that's why I enjoy it. Writers tend to be pretty open-minded, and pretty profane and loose. They have fun minds.

It's not that I don't enjoy other people, but what I find with writers is this back and forth. And also, there's no need to talk about work.

Usually, when you're talking about work with other writers it's because something seriously bad is going on with your work and you've absolutely thrown out a lifeline and you're hoping that someone will help you with something. Either there's some bad feeling you have about the work, or sometimes it's not specific - just kind of solidarity.

Before I had published anything, I still hung out with people who liked to write. None of us had published, so there was no talk about the business, and there was probably a lot more angsty talk back then. But these days maybe there are some more laments about the culture, but I would say no.

One of the things my friends would tell you is that I hang out with a lot of non-writers - just regular people like bankers and teachers, and I actually try to steer our talk away from my work when I get together with them.

Not to any really influential effect, but certainly there have been comments that have surprised me. It's surprising sometimes to get particular perspectives on your work, and it's enlightening sometimes to know that non-writers and readers out there have certain assumptions about everything that I both want to keep in mind and want to forget about why I write, and about the connection between me as a private person and the stuff that I think about on the page.

They're not parallel at all. They're my concerns, but how they're expressed particularly on the page is completely divorced from who I am in my street life.

Maybe someone's who's a different kind of writer [would think otherwise] - someone who'd be just as comfortable writing essays on what their novels are about. Sometimes you feel like certain novelists are like that.

I think that's great - I just try not to be one of those people. I find the more I think about it, the less free I feel when I write and when I work.

I think the action is ninety-three percent, and the consideration is peppered throughout but pretty short... Once I start it, I feel as though I don't want to look over my shoulder too much. I want to trust the preparations I've made.

I really try to forget. I only look at my old works if there's an interview and someone asks me about it. Otherwise, it's not even in the rearview mirror.

It's just a weird idea to me because each book is a complete universe unto itself, so why would I want this other universe from this other galaxy that has nothing to do with mine? That's how I really feel about it. Let's be honest - I'm still the writer, so certain things will be common denominators. But that I just want to keep natural and not studied.

Some writers are writing one great, big book and just taking all these different avenues towards it. They might seem on the outside to be different, but they're really not. And that's a different kind of mindset. I don't know why it is, but I just feel like I really want to escape myself as much as I can - myself as the artist, or as the writer, or as the thinker - with each new project, because one, it's just boredom, but also, I guess I just feel most comfortable starting a new book if I just feel a little in the dark about it.

Historical novels are about costumery. I think that's the magic and mystery of fiction. I don't want to write historical fiction but I do want the story to have the feel of history. There's a difference.

The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn't want to suggest that the past determines the present.

I wanted to present a sweep and scope of larger events, and a grander backdrop, but most important was to set against that a very singular, real and modest people struggling with every day and human struggles.