Writer Quotes

I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision.

I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

I didn't finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldn't work and I didn't have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.

I think it's silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know it.

The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea's alternate reality.

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

It's true. In America, you can reinvent yourself at any turn. And, you know, if things aren't going well for you in life, everyone says, change, become someone different.

In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

I'd known that the visit would be highly scripted and that genuine interactions with citizens wouldn't be possible, since it's illegal for them to speak with foreigners. Still, I'd thought I'd had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.

I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare light on the elusive realm of North Korea.

I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn't speak for themselves.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or

We teach teens what we think they ought to know, and we never tell them what they want to know.

They are uncomfortable talking about sex because they don't want people to think they know about it.

Kids are all computer-savvy. Sit down and write to your parents on the computer. And just say, I have some questions and I'm scared. There's some stuff I don't know and I really need to talk to you about sex. Tear it off and put it on their pillow. They'll read it.

Kids and adults have sex for many, many reasons... Put out a question box.

If you don't know about it, you can't get it.

Get to like your own body.

As long as I'm having fun, I'm not quitting.

Sex is... perfectly natural. It's something that's pleasurable. It's enjoyable and it enhances a relationship. So why don't we learn as much as we can about it and become comfortable with ourselves as sexual human beings because we are all sexual?

Americans are a decade behind Canada when it comes to sex education and understanding their bodies.

It's sad that the most glorious of sexual experiences can make us feel guilty, ashamed, embarrassed, and abnormal.

If you can't laugh about sex, you shouldn't be doing it.

Tyrannies not only want to control your mind and thoughts but your flesh as well.

The Chinese people have been forced to forget the Tiananmen massacre. There has been no public debate about the event, no official apology. The media aren't allowed to mention it. Still today people are being persecuted and imprisoned for disseminating information about it.

The Beijing Olympics represent China's grand entrance onto the world stage and confirmation of its new superpower status.