Top 200 Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “For a long time I felt bad. I wondered why I didn’t want to learn Japanese, why I didn’t already speak Japanese, why I would rather go to Paris or Istanbul or Barcelona rather than Tokyo. But then I thought, Who cares? Did anyone ask John F. Kennedy if he spoke Gaelic and visited Dublin or if he ate potatoes every night or if he collected paintings of leprechauns? So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn’t my culture right here since I was born here?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

102. “You’re too sympathetic, the General said. You didn’t see the danger in the major because he was fat and you took pity on him for that. Now the evidence shows that you’ve been willfully blind to the fact that Sonny is not only a left-wing radical but potentially a communist sleeper agent.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

103. “I could live without television, but not without books.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

104. “I think of the novelist Haruki Murakami, who compares writing a novel to digging a hole through deep rock to reach a source of water. To access mystery and intuition requires hard work and is a gamble, for there is no guarantee that we will find that source of water.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

105. “How do you know you’ve made a great work of art? A great work of art is something as real as reality itself, and sometimes even more real than the real. Long after this war is forgotten, when its existence is a paragraph in a schoolbook students won’t even bother to read, and everyone who survived it is dead, their bodies dust, their memories atoms, their emotions no longer in motion, this work of art will still shine so brightly it will not just be about the war but it will be the war.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

106. “Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

107. “Marriage is slavery, I said. And when God made us human – if God exists – He didn’t intend for us to be slaves to each other.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

108. “But in the month when this confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

109. “Despair may be thick, but friendship’s thicker.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

110. “I had won the argument, but somehow, as in our college days, he had won the audience.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

111. “She sold silk at the Ben Thanh market and possessed the eyes of an experienced negotiator, smooth and unreadable as the beads of an abacus.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

112. “The tendency to separate war stories from immigrant stories means that most Americans don’t understand how many of the immigrants and refugees in the United States have fled from wars – many of which this country has had a hand in. Although.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

113. “Quoting Nguyen Du – Talent and destiny are apt to feud.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

114. “When was the last time an American president found it worth his while to write a speech on the importance of art and literature? I cannot recall. And yet at Yan’an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination. Art could not be separated from politics, and politics needed art in order to reach the people where they lived, through entertaining them.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

115. “All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

116. “We must be vigilant, even of each other, but mostly of ourselves. What my time in the cave taught me is that the ultimate life-and-death struggle is with ourselves. Foreign invaders might kill my body, but only I could kill my spirit.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

117. “He’s the best thing that could have happened to us, I said. And that was no lie. It was, instead, the best kind of truth, the one that meant at least two things.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

118. “There is always something. That is confession’s nature.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

119. “Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

120. “He responded with one of those looks of pity and amusement I was by now so used to getting, the kind that implied not only was my fly undone, but that there was nothing to see even if it was.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

121. “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

122. “Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

123. “Let’s just hope history forgets the snafus.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

124. “We would all be in Hell if convicted of our thoughts.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

125. “And yet at Yan’an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination. Art.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

126. “Becoming a refugee is a gradual process, a bleaching ou, a transition into a ghostly existence.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

127. “Hollywood did not just make horror movie monsters, it was its own horror movie monster, smashing me under its foot.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

128. “What the song expressed so perfectly from lyric to melody was unrequited love, and we men of the south loved nothing more than unrequited love, cracked hearts our primary weakness after cigarettes, coffee, and cognac.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

129. “Isn’t that what education is all about? Getting the student to sincerely say what the teacher wants to hear? Keep that in mind.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

130. “You tried to play the game, okay? But they run the game. You don’t run anything. That means you can’t change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

131. “What was it like to live in a time when one’s fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one’s country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

132. “I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

133. “Saigon had also changed names after it changed hands, but they couldn’t bring themselves to call it Ho Chi Mind City. Neither could the taxi driver who ferried them from their hotel to the house, even though he was too young to remember a time when the city was officially Saigon.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

134. “The hardest thing to do in talking to a woman was taking the first step, but the most important thing to do was not to think.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

135. “There are more of you and he than you can probably imagine, but most are ashamed and seek to disappear in the foliage of American life. But your numbers are growing, and democracy gives you the best chance of finding your voice. Here you can learn how not to be torn apart by your opposing sides, but rather to balance them and benefit from both. Reconcile your divided allegiances and you will be the ideal translator between two sides, a goodwill ambassador to bring opposing nations to peace!”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

136. “Seeing the failures of both comunism and anticomunism, I chose nothing, a synthesis that neither capitalists nor communists could understand. You may think that I’m being a nihilist, but you could not be more wrong. While nihilists thought life was meaningless and rejected all religious and moral principles, I still believed in the principle of revolution. I also believed that nothing was full of meaning – in short, that nothing was actually something. Wasn’t that a kind of revolution in itself?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

137. “Japanese American, she corrected me. Not Japanese. And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation. And.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

138. “My parents did not grant me so much as an allowance. When I had asked for one in the fourth grade, my father had frowned and said, “Let me think it over.” The next night he handed me an itemized list of expenses that included my birth, feeding, education, and clothing, the sum total being $24,376. “This doesn’t include emotional aggravation, compound interest, or future expenses,” my father said. “Now when can you start paying me an allowance?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

139. “Those with hands cupped them for alms, those lacking in hands clenched the bill of a baseball cap in their teeth. Military amputees flapped empty sleeves like flightless birds, mute elderly beggars fixed cobra eyes on you, street urchins told tales taller than themselves about their pitiable conditions, young widows rocked colicky babies whom they might have rented, and assorted cripples displayed every imaginable, unappetizing illness known to man. Farther.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

140. “Even secret armies and political fronts needed clerks.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

141. “Really ingenious, he said. He had a Minnesotan’s admiration for resourcefulness in the face of hardship, bred by generations of people one very bad winter away from starvation and cannibalism. I.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

142. “So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

143. “What about your wives and kids? I.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

144. “I was not a bastard, I was not a bastard, I was not, I was not, I was not, unless, somehow, I was.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

145. “Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

146. “So it was that for two minutes we sang with all our hearts, feeling only for the past and turning our gaze from the future, swimmers doing the backstroke toward a waterfall.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

147. “I had the vertiginous feeling one gets standing at the precipice of an unresolved plan, for I had brought Bon and myself to the brink of disaster without knowing how to save us. But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

148. “The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

149. “At the gates, prickly rolls of barbed wire sagged with middle-aged disappointment.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

150. “This is what I think so many of us who work in the arts and the humanities hope to receive from our universities, from our government, from sometimes skeptical students and their parents: patience and faith in us as we test the limits of our ignorance, as we pursue what may very well be useless, as we go in search of that mystery and intuition that exist within all of us.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen