Amy Tan Quotes

• My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A’s from the time I was in kindergarten.

  Amy Tan

• My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.

  Amy Tan

• My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn’t always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.

  Amy Tan

• It’s both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.

  Amy Tan

• It’s a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

  Amy Tan

• In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

  Amy Tan

• I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that’s what I do as a writer.

  Amy Tan

• I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

  Amy Tan

• I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.

  Amy Tan

• I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

  Amy Tan

• I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn’t understand her English, because she was Chinese.

  Amy Tan

• I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn’t realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

  Amy Tan

• I think I’ve always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.

  Amy Tan

• I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away

  Amy Tan

• I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what’s comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.

  Amy Tan

• I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

  Amy Tan

• I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.

  Amy Tan

• I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.

  Amy Tan

• I have a writer’s memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

  Amy Tan

• I didn’t fear failure. I expected failure.

  Amy Tan

Amy Tan (43)

Birth:	19th February, 1952
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Writer

About

Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California. She is an American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships. Her best-known work is The Joy Luck Club, which has been translated into 35 languages. In 1993, the book was adapted into a commercially successful film. Tan has written several other bestselling novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter and Saving Fish from Drowning. She also wrote a collection of non-fiction essays entitled The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. In addition to these, Tan has written two children's books: The Moon Lady and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, which was turned into an animated series which aired on PBS. Tan received her bachelor's and master's degrees in English and linguistics from San José State University, and later did doctoral linguistics studies at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley.  She resides in Sausalito, California, with her husband, Louis DeMattei, a tax attorney whom she met on a blind date and married in 1974.

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Today's Anniversary - 7th January

Births

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Deaths

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• 1943 - Nikola Tesla
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