After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts.

— Alexander Chee

And I would tell him, as we rise into the air, The curse is not that we cannot choose our Fates. The curse, the curse we all live under, is that we can.

— Alexander Chee

I could stand before him, be in his arms as I was just then, and still be lost to him, some phantom of a desire he cherished more than he cherished me, the woman he claimed to love.

— Alexander Chee

I resented the idea of being talented. I couldn’t respect it — in my experience, no one else did. Being called talented at school had only made me a target for resentment. I wanted to work. Work, I could honor.

— Alexander Chee

Lillie Borne, La General, newly returned to Paris after a year spent away, the Falcon soprano whose voice was so delicate it was rumored she endangered it even by speaking, her silences as famous as her performances.

— Alexander Chee

Liz Benedict, a teacher of mine at Iowa, is the person who introduced me to James Salter's work.

— Alexander Chee

My fascination with women's clothes began very early. My mother was a very fashionable woman. She also made her own clothes. She had these fashion magazines, and I would draw the women in them. My middle school art teacher suggested that I have a fashion drawing show.

— Alexander Chee

PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

— Alexander Chee

Sappho isn't really meant to be read. It's meant to be sung and there were dances for the songs, also. Sappho was a performance artist, and now she exists as a textual project. She was saved by her critics, and by people who wrote of her in letters to each other. As the morning sun lathers the pool through the long windows and stripes the opposite walls in gold, I look at the fragment translations. She's paper, too. A paper poet for a paperboy. People claim to be translating her, but they don't, really, they use her to write poems from as they fill in the gaps in the fragments. A duet. She may have meant for these to be solos, but they're duets now, though the second singer blends in with the first. The first singer in this case is offstage, like in the old days of stars who couldn't sing, a real singer hidden behind a curtain, which is the velvet drape of history.

— Alexander Chee

Sometimes, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

— Alexander Chee