“It's easy when you grow up in fear to act out of fear. I don't want to embrace that fear; I prefer to be kind.”
“Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.”
“During my breakdown, many things, tiny things I had not even registered before, had begun to torment me with guilt. I used to steal Splenda from Starbucks. I would go into a Starbucks whenever I needed the sweetener and would take a fistful of packets, even when I didn't buy a coffee.”
“I am shamelessly biased about the people in my life, and it makes sense to me that other people are the same.”
“I thought it was quite wonderful coming to America. I think immigration is a very difficult thing, but America is a very wonderful place.”
“I think immigrants, when they're stressed, think that there's something wrong with America, when it's really just difficult to leave a country and all that you know.”
“We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.”
“We are often unaware of how much we love the people around us. This is true for everyone. We may think that we love certain people, but we don't know how profoundly we love them.”
“When someone gets a success, and we, too, have done good work and sometimes even better work than the person who has just triumphed, we wonder: 'Why did success pass me by?'”
“I don't really revise. I tend to rewrite.”