About Chang-Rae Lee: Chang-rae Lee is a Korean American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where he has served as the director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.
I don't like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can't go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises.
I write on a computer. On breaks, I'll make myself green tea. I don't want something too caffeinated. I guess I don't believe in chemical enhancement of my writing. Just slight, but nothing crazy.
Most people don't think about race as much as I do. They don't have to.
Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe, I don't like proper dress while working. I like writing in pajama-like clothing, which eases and relaxes me and allows me to connect with the decidedly improper.
What's fun about a dystopian novel is that we can enjoy and be entertained. But that world is only slightly different, right? It's familiar enough to be recognizable, and skewed enough to give us pause.
I didn't leave Wall Street because the work was against my nature - I do have a pretty good head for numbers. I left because I had this love for writing.
Even though I went to Exeter and Yale, and I enjoyed all the trappings of those places, I think at the same time - and maybe it's because I'm an immigrant kid and not white - there was always this other consciousness; that is, I was conscious of ever...
I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.
I think book clubs should read more contemporary poetry.
I often think that the prime directive for me as a teacher of writing is akin to that for a physician, which is this: do no harm.
I don't listen to music while writing; it seems to me I'm trying to make my own kind of music, and to have anything else going on is just noisy interference.
Before I start my work in the morning, I need to have quickly browsed the entire paper, noting articles that I want to read during lunch.
It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war.
I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.
