Amy Tan Quotes

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask.

He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner.

To many men well-fitting doors are not set on their tongues.

It is not sufficient to know what one ought to say, but one must also know how to say it.

Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

Eloquence; it requires the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true.

There's no sense in doing a lot of barking if you don't really have anything to say.

It is not the bigness of the words you utter, but the force with which you deliver them.

Shame on all eloquence which leaves us with a taste for itself and not for its substance.

I feel a responsibility to myself and my parents and the people whose love has gotten me this far - people who were in my life before fame. That's where I get my sense of self. It's deadly for anyone to take on that role of a deity; it's not sustainable. I've got tons of flaws. Call my mother - she'll tell you! She keeps it real. Sometimes you don't want to hear the truth; she'll tell it to you out of love.

Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.

When you blow away the foam, you get down to the real stuff.

Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.

Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,--a Sharp's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

We need to understand what we're saying matters.

I love revising things, because you see how you can get the language to get closer to intention. You know there are three ways to say X thing, but one will say it better than the other two. And in saying it better, it gets you closer to something.

If I can, I shall keep my death from saying anything that my life has not already said.

Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.

As regards my means of expression, I try my hardest to achieve the maximum of clarity, power, and plastic aggressiveness; a physical sensation to begin with, followed up by an impact on the psyche.

Fie on the eloquence that leaves us craving itself, not things!

Sometimes, to be silent is to be most eloquent.

I don't have a problem expressing myself.

Empty words almost echo within themselves