146 Quotes by Alexander Chee

My first novel was not the first one I started. It was the first one I finished.

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.

It isn't just that you fall in love with someone—you each allow yourself new identities with each other, new skins, almost like a cocoon to who you'll be next.

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

PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

I tilt my head back and carefully toss my hair over my right shoulder in the way I have seen my younger sister do. I realize I know one more thing about her than I did before - what it feels like to do this and why you would. It’s like your own little thunderclap.

...believing trouble is gone forever is the beginning of a special kind of trouble.

A collection like a circus of daredevils, but with the determined charm of a Chinese drag queen making her home in Iowa. Siasoco takes us on a trip through the world we know by way of characters I've not seen in fiction before, or at least, not enough of--characters with stories I have been waiting for. A bravura debut.

My mother’s most common childhood memory of me is standing next to me trying to be heard over the voice on the page. I didn’t really commit to writing until I understood that it meant making that happen for someone else.