Lit Hub celebrates the birthday of treasured writer Maxine Hong Kingston by sharing some of her best quotes about writing.
- “You . . . have to know what you want, you have to know yourself well enough to know how you work best.”
- “When I teach writing, I have people write a lot. I tell them: they can get an A if they write 50 pages and I’m not going to grade on quality because if you just write a lot then something will happen, the voice will start to flow, it will fall into place, it will find its own rhythm.”
- “The idea that we can only say nice things about our ethnic group, I think that’s superficial writing, and so I feel that I already honor them by writing tragedy—and tragedy has its own way of uplifting people.”
- “By ‘uplifting,’ I mean that art is a miraculous creation: that we can take terrible consequences in life and understand it and make art of it. That’s a necessary thing for a writer to do.”
- “I’m not an important person; I’m just anybody. And anybody’s life, a nobody’s life, could be a wonderful piece of art.”
