You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modernink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn.

And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.

too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.

And I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.

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

To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing. -Jing-mei