Top 80 Alexander Chee Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Alexander Chee

2. “Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.”

— Alexander Chee

3. “Writers aren’t born, they’re made – from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.”

— Alexander Chee

4. “With my family background – my parents were both activists – writing about culture and politics came naturally.”

— Alexander Chee

5. “The ideal editor will hold you to the best of yourself in the piece.”

— Alexander Chee

6. “Everyone would tell me they couldn’t identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can’t identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don’t live on Mt. Olympus.”

— Alexander Chee

7. “The myth works to make the very real things people don’t want to look at visible for them.”

— Alexander Chee

8. “I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.”

— Alexander Chee

9. “I’ve been told it’s hard to write about singing. I didn’t realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!”

— Alexander Chee

10. “It’s my experience that people don’t think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium – a fraud – for “just” writing fiction.”

— Alexander Chee

11. “Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the stage for that to happen as well as the prompts.”

— Alexander Chee

12. “As I get ready to buy a new computer, I’m stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard drive.”

— Alexander Chee

13. “Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you...”

— Alexander Chee

14. “As writer pay declined and teacher pay also, we all started hanging out online. You could say online social networks cheapen our friendships or you could say we were cheapened by a plutocratic power grab and this is all we can afford.”

— Alexander Chee

15. “The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist’s ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist’s life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.”

— Alexander Chee

16. “Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.”

— Alexander Chee

17. “I knew it was a risk but what I was after was a novel that is about the feeling that comes with a coincidence in real life – that you feel as if something divine has intervened and has arrived with a message.”

— Alexander Chee

18. “I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn’t put down or look away from.”

— Alexander Chee

19. “Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.”

— Alexander Chee

20. “I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.”

— Alexander Chee

21. “The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights.”

— Alexander Chee

22. “I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!”

— Alexander Chee

23. “Destroying art is practice for destroying people.”

— Alexander Chee

24. “And the gods did not kill for hubris-for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn.”

— Alexander Chee

25. “When the earth opens up under your feet, be like a seed. Fall down; wait for the rain.”

— Alexander Chee

26. “To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it.”

— Alexander Chee

27. “You could mistake your ability to go this far for strength. So you go on. Strength is admirable, after all, and you are ashamed of everything else about yourself. This endurance at least – this you can admire.”

— Alexander Chee

28. “Why is it so loud when you cry from grief? Because it must be loud enough for the missing one to hear, though it never can be. Loud enough to scale the sky and the backs of angels, or to fall through the earth to where they rest. And so it is sometimes when I sing that the notes come from me as if I believed I could reach them where they rest, they sure of a reunion I still cannot imagine or believe in except, sometimes, in song.”

— Alexander Chee

29. “What we lose with each death, though, is more like stars falling out of the sky and into the sea and gone. The something undone, the something that won’t ever be done, always remains unendurable to consider. A permanent loss of possibility, so that what is left is only ever better than nothing, but the loss is limitless.”

— Alexander Chee

30. “Mixed feelings were confusing feelings, and I didn’t feel confused except as to why it was so hard for everyone to understand that I existed. Living this way felt like discovering your shoe was nailed to the floor, but only one of them, so that you paced, always, a circle of possibility, defined by the limited imaginations of others.”

— Alexander Chee

31. “Reading teaches me the answers to the problems I haven’t had yet, or to problems I didn’t even know how to describe. And when I feel less alone with what troubles me, it is easier to find solutions. A book to me is like a friend, a shelter, advice, an argument with someone who cares enough to argue with me for a better answer than the one we both already have. Books aren’t just a door to another world-each book is part of a door to the whole world, a door that always has more behind it.”

— Alexander Chee

32. “Your imagination needs o be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.”

— Alexander Chee

33. “I was by now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing the person I would become already existed – some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was.”

— Alexander Chee

34. “After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts.”

— Alexander Chee

35. “Writers aren’t born, they’re made – from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage.”

— Alexander Chee

36. “Men often complain of the wickedness of women. Of how we delight in what power we have over their hearts. But they reign over everything else, so of course, they grudge us this, should we ever come to rule over this thing the size of their fist.”

— Alexander Chee

37. “The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do – I think it is even what fiction is for.”

— Alexander Chee

38. “51. What if the novel in you is one you yourself would never read? A beach novel, a blockbuster, a long, windy, character-driven literary drama that ends sadly? What if the one novel in you is the opposite of your idea of yourself?”

— Alexander Chee

39. “A novel, should it survive, protects what a missile can’t.”

— Alexander Chee

40. “There are two kinds of people, I think: those who want to know the future and those who do not. I’ve never met anyone ambivalent about this. I have been both kinds. For now, I think I know which one is better, but I’m prepared to change my mind again. It may be I am like that drunk who tells himself he can handle his alcohol now. But if I told you I could tell the future, you would laugh at me. And I would laugh at me too.”

— Alexander Chee

41. “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.”

— Alexander Chee

42. “The quiet around her seems to make the focus of her prettiness sharper, the air’s stillness focuses her in the eye. As if talking might make it harder to see someone.”

— Alexander Chee

43. “Novels are delicate when they are being written, if also voracious. They move around my rooms, stripping half-finished poems of their lines, stealing ideas from unfinished essays, diaries, letters, and sometimes each other. Sometimes, by the time I get to them, one has taken a huge bite from the other.”

— Alexander Chee

44. “Write fiction about your life and pay with your life, at least three times. Here is the ax.”

— Alexander Chee

45. “Nothing to fear from a fate that was already yours, then, except, perhaps, that it would never leave you.”

— Alexander Chee

46. “You are never lost in sorrow, it seems to me, ever. You do know the way. In fact, you don’t think there’s any other. Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road would through life, through the days of your life, like the old Roman ruins near the Tuileries or the rue d’Enfer – underneath this life, but never really apart from it.”

— Alexander Chee

47. “Why was there never an opera that ended with a soprano who was free?”

— Alexander Chee

48. “When I am gripped with despair, when I think I might stop, I speak to my dead. Tell them a story. What am I doing with this life? They hold me accountable. I let them make me bolder or more modest or louder or more moving, but I ask them to listen, and then write.”

— Alexander Chee

49. “The storm is a glazier. Then fog passes through, touches the cold trees to add to the ice already there. Here the wind spins glass from the water it has stolen off the sea and the lakes, off the hair on my head and the breath out of my mouth, the storm takes the water from us all everywhere, to make of a mountain range a stained-glass depiction of a saint no one knows.”

— Alexander Chee

50. “Sometimes the writer writes one novel, then another, then another, and the first one he sells is the first one the public sees – but mostly, the debut novel is almost never the first novel the writer wrote. There’s a private idea of the writer, known to the writer and whoever rejected him previously, and a public one, visibly only in publication. Each book is something of a mask of the troubles that went into it and so is the writer’s visible career.”

— Alexander Chee