Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

I hope my writing has many layers, as human beings have layers.

I think that individual voices are not as strong as a community of voices. If we can make a community of voices, then we can speak more truth. Also in a community, we learn to listen…

I feel that everyone has a blurred area, which is a border between their imagination and what actually happens, and I am very interested in that border.

I feel that I break through pigeonholes of what's fiction and what's nonfiction, of what an autobiography is. (1990)

what I wanted to do was... I was going to write against the minimalist novel in order to write a global novel. The reason I was thinking of a global novel was that I began to notice that every city that I went to anywhere in the world is a cosmopolitan city. You come to Beijing, London, anywhere, and you are surrounded by people from all over the world. Every country has had its diaspora and everybody is going everywhere, and so in order to write a story about any city, any American city or any other city, you have to be able to write characters from every cultural background. A story of a city is also the story of all the people on the entire planet.

The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods. (p64)

When the peace demonstrations turned violent, and doves and hawks were using the same tactics-revolutionary and governmental provocateurs infiltrating parades and vigils, Governor Ray Gun ordering the National Guard and helicopters to tear-gas and shoot up People's Park and Berkeley (they killed James Rector, and blinded an artist)-Wittman Ah Sing and Taña made up their minds to leave America. (first lines)

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. (p29)

The wind is time blowing by. (p189)

Maybe it comes from living in San Francisco, city of clammy humors and foghorns that warn and warn-omen, o-o-men, o dolorous omen, o dolors of omens-and not enough sun, but Wittman Ah Sing considered suicide every day. Entertained it. (first lines)

Linda wrote in her Ph.D. dissertation: "Vietnam duty provided the most unambiguous source of antiwar sentiment." War causes peace. (p227)

I don't want to regurgitate. Writing should be constantly an act of creation and going forward into the new.

Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear. (p87)

When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound. (p19)

When I write most deeply, fly the highest, reach the furthest, I write like a diarist-that is, my audience is myself. I dare to write anything because I can burn my papers at any moment. I do not begin with the thought of an audience peering over my shoulder, nor do I find my being understood a common occurrence anyway-a miracle when it happens.