Literary Birthday – 27 October – Maxine Hong Kingston

Happy Birthday, Maxine Hong Kingston, born 27 October 1940.

Nine Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

1. In a time of destruction, create something.
2. This is the most important thing about me—I’m a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I’m a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don’t have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read.
3. I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
4. To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world — that I am able to change it in positive ways.
5. 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.
6. We’re all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we’re alive together during the same moment.
7. 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.
8. When I’m teaching, I tell my students: It’s all process. Don’t even think of product.
9. The difference between mad people and sane people… is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.

Maxine Hong Kingston is a Chinese American author and professor. She has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about Chinese immigrants in the United States. She is the author of China Men and The Woman Warrior. She uses slipstream fiction techniques in her writing.

Source for Image: David Shankbone, CC BY 2.5 <>, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maxine_Hong_Kingston_by_David_Shankbone.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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