146 Quotes by Alexander Chee

When the earth opens up under your feet, be like a seed. Fall down; wait for the rain.

A novel, should it survive, protects what a missile can’t.

What we lose with each death, though, is more like stars falling out of the sky and into the sea and gone. The something undone, the something that won’t ever be done, always remains unendurable to consider. A permanent loss of possibility, so that what is left is only ever better than nothing, but the loss is limitless.

There are two kinds of people, I think: those who want to know the future and those who do not. I’ve never met anyone ambivalent about this. I have been both kinds. For now, I think I know which one is better, but I’m prepared to change my mind again. It may be I am like that drunk who tells himself he can handle his alcohol now. But if I told you I could tell the future, you would laugh at me. And I would laugh at me too.

Yes, everything’s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing makes it possible.

The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do – I think it is even what fiction is for.

I was by now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing the person I would become already existed – some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was.

Novels are delicate when they are being written, if also voracious. They move around my rooms, stripping half-finished poems of their lines, stealing ideas from unfinished essays, diaries, letters, and sometimes each other. Sometimes, by the time I get to them, one has taken a huge bite from the other.

Writers aren’t born, they’re made – from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage.