Chang-Rae Lee

My writing day follows my family's day. I get a good few hours in the mornings when the kids are out of the house. And I don't work at night any more. I like to see my family. ”

My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled. ”

We arrived the way most emigrant families did. My father came first, and the rest of us - my mother, my sister and me - followed a year later. ”

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. ”

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately. ”

In my teaching, I try to expose my students to the widest range of aesthetic possibilities, so I'll offer them stories from Anton Chekhov to Denis Johnson, from Flannery O'Connor to A.M. Homes, and perhaps investigating all that strange variation of beauty has rubbed off on me. Or perhaps that's why I enjoy teaching literature. ”

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. ”

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 everything that was going on. ”

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. ”

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. ”