Lisa See Quotes

Some of what I am doing when I am researching is looking for things people in my family have done and finding out what those things mean, why they did those things and seeing how I fit into them.

People write to me all the time, and I write back.

People come in and out of our lives, and the true test of friendship is whether you can pick back up right where you left off the last time you saw each other.

Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I’ve tried to incorporate both of those things – pure emotion and being more visual – into my writing.

One of the things that’s pretty unique about nu shu, when you look especially at these old letters and stories that have been saved, is that there are certain lines that are very standard that are used again and again. It’s almost like a formula in a sense, so that these certain lines come up again and again.

Nu shu means women’s writing. And it was a secret writing system that was invented by women, used by women and kept a secret by women in one very remote county in China for a thousand years. It’s the only language that was invented and used by women to have been found anywhere in the world.

My hardcover sales are 17% down in books but up 400% in electronics.

It used to happen in villages and towns in China that they would have – I guess you’d call them beauty contests – where all of the women of a particular village or town would be seated behind these screens or curtains with only their feet showing.

I write what I’m interested in.

I write a thousand words a day.

I think to really be literate in nu shu you only need about 600 characters because it is phonetic. So you’re able to then create many words out of one character.

I think sometimes as an adult, you take people for what they do, and what they are now, instead of the whole picture of their lives.

I think all women have a friend who at some point dumped them or betrayed them or deeply disappointed them. And at the same time all women have a friend who they dumped or betrayed or hurt in some way. That’s universal in women’s friendships.

I love research. I’d go so far as to say I’m a research fanatic.

I don’t really know anything about the movie business, even though I’ve lived in Los Angeles my whole life – somehow I’ve never bumped into it.

I am an eighth Chinese, and I come from a large Chinese-American family in Los Angeles.

But, you know, I just did a big trip in the spring to Vietnam and Cambodia and Thailand, and that’s when I bought a Kindle. I have like 15 books on this one little gizmo. But when I came home, the first night I picked up the book that was on my nightstand and I went right back to that.