Maxine Hong Kingston

When I'm teaching, I tell my students: It's all process. Don't even think of product.

There can't be a pure myth, especially when the myth has been handed down in the oral tradition. As the stories are told, they change. If the stories don't change they just die.

In a time of destruction, create something.

Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.

We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one's guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms.

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for contradictions.

When I am composing, I try to clear my mind of having to publish, or having to sell a book or find readers. That kind of thinking gets in the way.

A story can take you through a whole process of searching, seeking, confronting, through conflicts, and then to a resolution. As the storyteller and the listener, we go through a story together.

Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.