Top 50 Chang-rae Lee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In every betrayal dwells a self-betrayal.”

— Chang-rae Lee

2. “The truth, finally, is who can tell it.”

— Chang-rae Lee

3. “There is secrecy and betrayal but that’s more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that’s modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.”

— Chang-rae Lee

4. “I want the flashbacks to feel that once you’re there they have their own unity, their own kind of atmospheric sensibility; I want the reader to be transported. The novel is a big, complicated, unknowable thing before it’s written.”

— Chang-rae Lee

5. “I think that’s great – I just try not to be one of those people. I find the more I think about it, the less free I feel when I write and when I work.”

— Chang-rae Lee

6. “The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn’t want to suggest that the past determines the present.”

— Chang-rae Lee

7. “For sometimes you can’t help but crave some ruin in what you love.”

— Chang-rae Lee

8. “It is ‘where we are’ that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.”

— Chang-rae Lee

9. “In America, he said, it’s even hard to stay Korean.”

— Chang-rae Lee

10. “A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.”

— Chang-rae Lee

11. “You can be affected by a person because of something particular they said or did but sometimes how a person was, a manner of being, that gets most deeply absorbed, and prompts you to revisit certain parts of your life with an enhanced perspective, flowing forward right up to now.”

— Chang-rae Lee

12. “Imagination might not be limitless. It’s still tethered to the universe of what we know.”

— Chang-rae Lee

13. “For if there is ever a moment when we are most vulnerable, it’s when we’re closest to the idea of the attained desire, and thus farthest from ourselves, which is when we’ll tread through any flame.”

— Chang-rae Lee

14. “For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that passion makes us believe we can overleap any walls, obliterate whatever obstacles.”

— Chang-rae Lee

15. “We reshape the story even when we believe we are simply repeating it.”

— Chang-rae Lee

16. “No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.”

— Chang-rae Lee

17. “Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?”

— Chang-rae Lee

18. “I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.”

— Chang-rae Lee

19. “We can skip through a lot of the stuff people might ask about the writing of the book, and so their comments always start well, well down into the nitty-gritty.”

— Chang-rae Lee

20. “What if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted? And then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit? But you keep coming back for more?”

— Chang-rae Lee

21. “To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.”

— Chang-rae Lee

22. “What hasty preparations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we’re sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we’ll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equipped for the dawn.”

— Chang-rae Lee

23. “It is in the rules, a woman like that. There is no choice. With someone like Sophie, you are part of a greater agency, you make sure things are going right for her. If she is not mean-spirited or too selfish, you fall in love. You grow up, you become a man, you realize you have clear responsibilities. Then you are truly with her. You are partners.”

— Chang-rae Lee

24. “She believed that displays of emotion signaled a certain failure between people. The only person who could upset her, make her cry or laugh in the open, was my father. He could always unsettle her face with a stern admonition or an old joke or pun in Korean. Otherwise, I thought she possessed the most exquisite control over the muscles of her face. She seemed to have the subtle power of inflection over them, the way a tongue can move air.”

— Chang-rae Lee

25. “I rarely talk about work with writers, and I love getting together with writers. I think writers are great to get together with, because we can talk about everything. I think that’s why I enjoy it. Writers tend to be pretty open-minded, and pretty profane and loose. They have fun minds.”

— Chang-rae Lee

26. “We shouldn’t take for granted the security and comfort of our neighborhoods, we shouldn’t think that always leaving our windows open and our doors unlocked means that we’re beyond an encroachment. We may believe our gates are insurmountable and that we’re armored by routines, but can’t we be touched by chance or fate, plucked up like a mouse foraging along his well-worn trail? Before you know it, you’re looking down at the last faint print of your claws in the dirt.”

— Chang-rae Lee

27. “In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.”

— Chang-rae Lee

28. “So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you are at that moment, accrued all through time, so I accept that.”

— Chang-rae Lee

29. “They’re not parallel at all. They’re my concerns, but how they’re expressed particularly on the page is completely divorced from who I am in my street life.”

— Chang-rae Lee

30. “For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.”

— Chang-rae Lee

31. “It’s not that I don’t enjoy other people, but what I find with writers is this back and forth. And also, there’s no need to talk about work.”

— Chang-rae Lee

32. “My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled.”

— Chang-rae Lee

33. “And it occurred to me that in this new millennial life of instant and ubiquitous connection, you don’t in fact communicate so much as leave messages for one another, these odd improvisational performances, often sorry bits and samplings of ourselves that can’t help but seem out of context. And then when you do finally reach someone, everyone’s so out of practice or too hopeful or else embittered that you wonder if it would be better not to attempt contact at all.”

— Chang-rae Lee

34. “Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.”

— Chang-rae Lee

35. “Yeah, and the language the “we” has, and the character the “we” has. Because that was the part of the book that I didn’t plan out, but the part that I was most curious about as I was writing. You know what you’re doing, but you’re sometimes still sort of curious as you’re writing it.”

— Chang-rae Lee

36. “I’d always wanted to write something about the Korean War because of my heritage. My father lost his brother during the war, and I fictionalized that episode, which was told to me very briefly without much detail.”

— Chang-rae Lee

37. “As for what’s the most challenging aspect of teaching, it’s convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.”

— Chang-rae Lee

38. “When I’m describing wartime activities or violence I don’t want to be too ornate, to prettify the picture. Once we trace them to the present, the prose becomes denser.”

— Chang-rae Lee

39. “I really try to forget. I only look at my old works if there’s an interview and someone asks me about it. Otherwise, it’s not even in the rearview mirror.”

— Chang-rae Lee

40. “What does the pilgrim hope for at journey’s end? Her beliefs confirmed? Revelation? Or does she secretly wish that the destination never quite materializes, that it keeps receding, ever shrouded in the distance, all the more to feed an inextinguishable devotion?”

— Chang-rae Lee

41. “It’s not that I wrote those details, but photos can give you the confidence that you have a real feel for the landscape. Then you can invent with a solid kind of faith, and recreate a feel and flavor of the time, and, one hopes, a tonality, a sense of that time having been lived by those characters.”

— Chang-rae Lee

42. “And too intense a longing, everyone knows, can lead to poor decisions, rash actions, hopes that become outsized and in turn deform reality.”

— Chang-rae Lee

43. “The more we follow the turns of her journey, the more we realize that she is not quite the champion we would normally sing; she is not the heroine who wields the great sword; she is not the bearer of wisdom and light; she does not head the growing column, leading a new march. She is one of the ranks, this perfectly ordinary, exquisitely tiny person in whom we will reside, via both living and dreaming.”

— Chang-rae Lee

44. “One of the things my friends would tell you is that I hang out with a lot of non-writers – just regular people like bankers and teachers, and I actually try to steer our talk away from my work when I get together with them.”

— Chang-rae Lee

45. “Before I had published anything, I still hung out with people who liked to write. None of us had published, so there was no talk about the business, and there was probably a lot more angsty talk back then. But these days maybe there are some more laments about the culture, but I would say no.”

— Chang-rae Lee

46. “I did feel a little afraid, as you say, the complete liberty and “elasticity” of it. But I found that I liked some of the things that it availed me of in terms of emotion and tonal stuff. I came to find it appealing.”

— Chang-rae Lee

47. “Like most people, Im fascinated by characters who are completely flawed personalities, riven by anguish and doubt, and are psychologically suspect.”

— Chang-rae Lee

48. “Historical novels are about costumery. I think that’s the magic and mystery of fiction. I don’t want to write historical fiction but I do want the story to have the feel of history. There’s a difference.”

— Chang-rae Lee

49. “She was quite enrapt, we were certain, even as her face remained almost totally blank, just as a drinking glass remains unchanged when filled with water but of course it is not at all the same.”

— Chang-rae Lee

50. “He handed her a plastic container of dried fruit Loreen had packed for the trip to use as a steering wheel so she could practice matching the turns... Fan’s arms began to ache from holding up the container but she was beginning to enjoy herself, too, feeling an unlikely liberty and exhilaration, which if you think about it, can be seen as a good approximation of this life, where control is more believed than actual.”

— Chang-rae Lee