A Quote by Junot Diaz
I think a lot of the most interesting immigrant writing involves stepping outside of that old, dreary binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker is a great example. Same goes for Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.
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According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."
Women have been writing strong women characters for a long time - hello, Maxine Hong Kingston! - it's just taken mainstream comics a really long while to catch up.
The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to the transformatory distinctions Kingston makes between the conditions of being a prose writer and "the poet," my multigenre impulses incline me to a broader transformation: to be a writer.
After twenty years and thirty stories, thirteen pieces were finally selected and the collection was born. So far, the blurbs from [authors] Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen, Robert Olen Butler, Oscar Hijuelos and others, have been most encouraging.
"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.
Lee Chang-dong, Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho. I think the three filmmakers tell the stories that they really want to tell. Their movies always reveal what they think must be told. I have a lot of respect for that.
I've always made things either paintings, drawing, photographs, or writing. It's all kind of the same thing. It all involves saying more, I guess. It involves separating life, breaking off this chunk that's devoted to making something. There's a lot of pleasure in that, but there can also be a lot of struggle. There's always this fantasy that you could just live life and not have to think about it.
The most effective way to live is as a warrior. A warrior may worry and think before making any decision, but once he makes it, he goes his way, free from worries or thoughts; there will be a million other decisions still awaiting him. That's the warrior's way.
Our love of kung fu goes back to the Bruce Lee days in the 1970s. Outside the action, we loved the interesting, heartfelt stories and the dialogue. It was RZA's idea to draw all that in there as samples.
I think I'm a combination of very simple pleasures and the fact I've read a lot of books. I don't think it's a binary opposition across the board in humans and I think I'm an example that it's not. I'm hosting gay marriage rallies and I have tons of guns at home. There's a lot of middle ground in the world and I'm one of those people.
Old or young, healthy as a horse or a person with a disability that hasn't kept you down, man or woman, Native American, native born, immigrant, straight or gay - whatever; the test ought to be I believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. I believe in religious liberty. I believe in freedom of speech. I believe in working hard and playing by the rules. I'm showing up for work tomorrow. I'm building that bridge to the 21st century. That ought to be the test.
My creative process involves reading books and magazines, writing outside, and moving around a lot. I like to pace around when I'm writing songs.
There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing.
The thing I respond to the most is just great writing, interesting characters. I like to think that there is something fun about playing a character that has a lot of authority in her own life.
I think that Hollywood should also be influenced by directors from Hong Kong. You see how Quentin Tarantino is really the example of how you can develop, and how you can go ahead if you accept the existence of different cinematic cultures. There you have Quentin playing with kung-fu. That's why the independents are the most interesting.
I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.
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