When you are a person who comes from a multicultural background it just means that you have more information coming in from the universe. And it's yo… - Maxine Hong Kingston

I do believe that our lives and our art go together. Who I am and what I write are the same...I feel that the writing process doesn't just begin when you are putting words on paper. It begins in the living that you do before, and I feel powerful enough now so that I can set up my daily living circumstances in order to support me and support my art.

What's crazy is the idea that revolutionaries must shoot and bomb and kill, that revolution is the same as war. (p305)

I am a very slow, slow writer and thinker and reader- (Interviewer: You are a perfectionist.) MHK: Actually I think maybe it's the normal course of creation. The journey in the Odyssey takes twenty years. It takes twenty years to live an experience, learn its meanings, find the words to tell it.