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Maxine Hong Kingston
112 quotes
“The poem begins: I am turning 65 years of age. And so I am thinking about how am I growing old. How am I becoming an elder? How am I becoming an elder? I would love to go back to China and be old because there we hear that older people are loved and appreciated. I can't grow old in America. America is a country for young people. So I can't grow old here. Should I go back to China and grow old there? So those are the questions that I'm asking…”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On a poem she was composing about aging in “Maxine Hong Kingston Takes Pride in Mixed Heritage” in NPR (2007 Jul 4)
“I feel that it's part of my work as an artist, a creator, a human being, is to integrate and to be more inclusive and to define American as large and not as exclusive. (2007)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I see these soldiers, people coming back from the wars, and they are so wounded. They are so hurt from what they have experienced and the actions which they have made in the world. And now there is work to be done in pulling our country together and the world together. That's the work that comes after a war. It's how to make peace and how to make the world whole again. (2007)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“war is utter destructive violent chaos. There is no "art," no "order(s)," no "just war." No matter what the ideologies, wars are the same. (sonshi)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I was writing The Woman Warrior, I felt that I was writing something completely different; that nothing like it had ever been written. So I thought if I couldn’t get it published, I would just keep copies and it would really be okay if it was published after I die or if somebody discovered it 100 years from now, 1,000 years from now. I’m always thinking about people reading it someday — and that will be alright.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Remember when the narrator is bullying the other girl? She says to her, “Just say ‘ow.’ Just say anything, just make a sound.” I guess that’s the first step: make a sound. I think for everybody that just being able to speak up is a bravery, which they have to learn. But for a writer, it’s to be able to find a style and a rhythm and a structure to be able to tell a story. I think that is another way of finding voice, and it’s not that easy….”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writing is an act of nonviolence, but it’s very active, very aggressive, but you’re not setting off bombs or guns. Just using the pen. It’s like shouting and getting your voice heard and the range is worldwide. You might not be able to stop a war right now, but the words can go out and influence the atmosphere and the world, way into the future.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that individual voices are not as strong as a community of voices. If we can make a community of voices, then we can speak more truth. Also in a community, we learn to listen…”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All during the Vietnam War, I could feel there was a darkness hanging over the whole world and it lasted for so long.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we imagine characters, can we cause them to appear in the real world? What if I could strongly write peace, I can cause an end to war.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do believe that our lives and our art go together. Who I am and what I write are the same...I feel that the writing process doesn't just begin when you are putting words on paper. It begins in the living that you do before, and I feel powerful enough now so that I can set up my daily living circumstances in order to support me and support my art.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The way I've looked at it is that I want to write about myself and other people in the truest way possible. To write a true autobiography or biography, I have to know what the other person dreams and how her imagination works. I am less interested in dates and facts.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have this motto which is, Pay attention and tell the truth. And in telling the truth, sometimes you tell it fictionally, sometimes you tell it nonfictionally.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've spent too many years carrying writing as if it were a burden that's only mine. I want to tell everybody, and young people too, that there are many things that we must do in community. I wish I had started sooner.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't want to regurgitate. Writing should be constantly an act of creation and going forward into the new.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“remembrance and that happiness are mourning, too, transformed.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Q: "will that be your major goal-to achieve peace?") Yes, yes-to put out into the world a vision of peaceful living and of how human beings can relate to one another harmoniously and joyfully and how groups of people come together. I feel that peace has hardly been imagined. It is rarely dramatized in the theater, in the movies, even in books.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that in order to recognize a warm-hearted human being, you have to be a warm-hearted human being yourself.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the wonderful things about the 1960s was language. There was a new language and there were wonderful new ways of describing psychedelic states, spiritual states, trying to find new words for political actions like those of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. What do you call that when you sit at the lunch counter and you don't move and you do it with peace and love?”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do believe that if we study any one discipline deeply, it will connect us to everything else.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Q: "In your Book of Peace, what would you be claiming?") Oh, what would I be claiming this time? What I would like to do is claim evolution that we can evolve past being a warring species into a peaceful species so that we are not predators anymore, and that we stop being carnivorous. If only we could stop being cannibals-”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am a very slow, slow writer and thinker and reader- (Interviewer: You are a perfectionist.) MHK: Actually I think maybe it's the normal course of creation. The journey in the Odyssey takes twenty years. It takes twenty years to live an experience, learn its meanings, find the words to tell it.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't like hearing non-Chinese people say to a Chinese person, "Well now I know about you because I have read Maxine Hong Kingston's books." Each artist has a unique voice. Many readers don't understand that. The problem of how "representative" one is will only be solved when we have many more Chinese American writers. Then readers will see how diverse our people are.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I write I also claim America in a literary way, in an artistic way. When people claim countries, it's usually thought of as conquering them in war. I'm claiming America in a pacifist way, in an artistic way.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel that everyone has a blurred area, which is a border between their imagination and what actually happens, and I am very interested in that border.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You go into the subconscious by not writing and then you make it normal consciousness by writing. Then you rewrite until you are working almost mechanically: the grammar and the structure all mental and rational. But now comes the time for not doing any writing. I mean to get far into the subconscious, where there are not word sequences.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel so bad sometimes thinking of this great oral tradition, and along comes somebody like me who writes it down. People go to the library and pull out a book and say, "Here's the authentic story." It's not! That was only the odd person who came along, like Homer, and wrote it down. It's the same thing with the Chinese. Most of the tradition was oral and then someone came along and wrote it down.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it's like a habit. I have to eat, I have to breathe, I have to write.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“("A friend once described Woman Warrior as convoluted.") MHK: Oh, I'm very proud of being convoluted. I try to be convoluted. Life is convoluted. I know there are some people who have a certain expectation of a linear kind of story where everything is explained to them and it goes at a slower pace and it's more of an accessible, popular kind of writing style. If they expect that, then they can't get into a more complicated book. I think that people like that miss out on something because they are not willing to work harder.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it takes a whole life to organize and demonstrate and it takes another whole life to get writing done. The problem is making the day stretch from one point to another.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While I love young people, I like to talk to people my own age. I feel very lucky when we get together and there are middle-aged people and they still have their art, their writing, their acting. That's exciting. Like there is still life and the business of time and taking that away from them has not stopped them from being youthful.”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am looking for a language of peace. I am trying to rewrite a book of peace. And so maybe that is fighting for the soul, not just of Chinese American people, but the human soul. I want the human soul to be one where people care for one another and where people cherish and nourish and value one another, and I am trying to think of ways of conflict resolution that have to do with talking or hugging or something, whereas his idea of conflict resolution is to kill each other. (1991)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the things he (Thích Nhất Hạnh) says is that we don't know how to feel peace. We don't understand the joy that is peace. We think that it's boring. And that is an aesthetic and a social perception. He is dealing with many of these same problems we are facing, and I just know he has some answers. (1991)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These struggles have got to result in happy endings for all, and the readers must learn not to worship tragedy as the highest art any more. (1990)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I travel a lot, and I know that I communicate very well in person, on one to one, but the books say things in a better way than I can get verbally, and also it works so efficiently, with those books getting out all over the world. (1990)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that feminist writers have been writing with power and pride, but I am suggesting that we have to invent new images and ways of power. So far the world thinks of power as violence, that power comes from a gun. We must create a new kind of drama in which there is drama, but it's nonviolent. And this has barely been thought of. (1990)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hope when artists write new characters, we invent new archetypes and they are visions of ways that we can be...What we need to do is to be able to imagine the possibility of a playful, peaceful, nurturing, mothering man, and we need to imagine the possibilities of a powerful, nonviolent woman and the possibilities of harmonious communities and if we can just imagine them, that would be the first step toward building them and becoming them. (1990)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“what I want is to give people questions (which I think are very creative things) and then when people wrestle with them and struggle with them in their own minds and in their own lives, all kinds of exciting things happen to them. I don't want people to throw the responsibility back to me. (1990)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's a redemption that takes place in art (1990)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the first things I ever noticed and loved about reading is that words can get through all kinds of barriers; they can get through skin color and culture. It's so easy to read and go through all kinds of struggles with an author. I love the way, when we read, we actually take on the mind of the person that we're reading. (1990)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've heard people say, "Why don't you write about rich, successful Chinese American people? Why don't you write real role models?" I think I do write about the great emotional, psychological struggles. I'm not that interested in writing Horatio Alger stories. I think of myself as somebody who's been given a gift of an amazing literary voice, and so I want to be the voice of the voiceless. I'm not that interested in being the voice of a wealthy, corporate Chinese American executive. (1990)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel that I break through pigeonholes of what's fiction and what's nonfiction, of what an autobiography is. (1990)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you are a person who comes from a multicultural background it just means that you have more information coming in from the universe. And it's your task to figure out how it all integrates, figure out its order and its beauty. It's a harder, longer struggle. (1989)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a refusal to understand that an American can look like one of us and doesn't have to be white. (1989)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was really shocked when I came out with my first book. At that time there were some Asian American men who were all we had of our literary community. And I expected, when my book came out, for them to say, welcome. Welcome to the community of artists. Because there are so few of us. So here's another one to add strength to our numbers. And, instead, the men just right away went into this big thing. It's a very crazy plot they have in their heads. Their assessment of the publishing industry is so wrong. (1989)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“a lot of Chinese Americans get mad, because they say my experience is nothing like theirs. Of course, they may come from a different class of people; they come from a different generation of migration; they're a different generation American. There aren't enough books out there. If there were lots of books, then you could see the variety of people in the books, reflecting the variety of people in life. But since there aren't a whole lot of books... (1989)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(about visiting China for the first time) MHK: I did feel that I was going back to a place that I had never been. (1986)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The power of imagination leads us to what's real... it's a bridge toward reality. (1986)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am creating part of American literature, and I was very aware of doing that, of adding to American literature. The critics haven't recognized my work enough as another tradition of American literature. (1986)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For fiction, we fantasize about what we would like to happen: I am making what I would like to happen happen. And so, this writing always feels new and going forward. If there is such a thing as reverse memory, maybe that's what I am getting into; because it seems to me, I'm writing the memory of the future rather than a memory of the past. (1986)”
Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source