A Quote by Chang-Rae Lee
After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the book would work, but to be honest, I think I knew it would never work, even as I was finishing it.
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Even when disco went out, I could still make hits. Once I had so much success, every idea became concentrated. I had so much confidence. I knew how the bass should sound, what rhythms would work. The tempos I knew: 110 to 120 BPM. I knew they would dance in the clubs in New York or anywhere.
I went to Wellesley College, and it was really hard for me to get a job after I graduated. I would go into places where I would not see any black people at all in Boston - like, zero. And then in publishing in New York City, it was pretty much the same. I knew that it wasn't about the value of my work.
For me, I never knew what addiction was. I just knew my heroes, like [New York Dolls guitarist] Johnny Thunders, did heroin. I didn't have a father, it looked good to me. If I had read Johnny Thunders' book The Heroin Diaries, I don't think I would have done heroin.
I hoped to win a medal and hoped it would be gold. I knew I was good but didn't know I would be the one to score something that had never been done before.
I went to New York out of college, and in my day, we were told that was the way you became a good actor. You don't go to Hollywood, you go straight to New York and work in the theater. So that's what most of the people I knew did.
I certainly knew of 'World of Warcraft'; I had never actually played because I knew that if I started playing, I would never get any work done - because it would just totally absorb me.
I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.
During the late 1980s, I was in Delhi finishing my college and modeling. After reading an article that my mother wrote for a fashion glossy, Mahesh Bhatt sahab expressed the desire meet her. That's when he saw my pictures and asked whether I would want to work in Hindi films.
Oh, and one more thing: If I try something that I've never done before, something that's particularly difficult for me, and it doesn't work out, that doesn't make it a failure. The fact that I actually succeeded in finishing it makes it a huge success. Think of all the people who never even try.
Audrey, it seems to me, never strove or hoped to leave a lasting legacy with her films - she was far too modest for that. But what I think she would have wanted, had she been given more time, would have been to continue her work for children because she knew that is a task with so much to be accomplished.
I knew I would work in a community that I would like to live in, but I had no idea that I would ever go into politics, even though some of my classmates thought I would.
I felt like a failure for so long because I wasn't able to access myself in the way I knew I would have if I was going to make music that mattered. I knew I was going to have to learn how to be honest.
For me, the favourite chapters have always been the last chapters in the books. I knew exactly how each book would end - and how the first chapter of the following book would begin. I knew I wanted to leave the readers with answers - and a bunch of new questions!
Moving to Trinidad was a great experiment. I never knew what it would do to my work or even if it would be accepted by people and not be seen as me just falling off the edge of the earth.
I knew that I wanted to live in a city, but had never really been to New York. But I was begging my parents as a kid to move to New York, so it was just something that I sort of knew from a young age.
The book [There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé?] is quite complex, and I was worried that it would be marketed as one-sided or flat, and I knew that Mickalene's [Tomas] work would be able to encompass all the many states of being that are in the book.
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