Chang-Rae Lee Quotes

I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.

A novel can be set in motion by an incident, a character, a location, a mood - by anything at all. Sometimes the stimulus can be an idea, which will rapidly clothe itself in character and incident. 'Foreign Bodies' came about through the contemplation of the contrast between post-second world war America and Europe.

I don't think they knew very much about the war in Korea at all.

In 1953, after the armistice ending the Korean War, South Korea lay in ruins. President Eisenhower was eager to put an end to hostilities that had left his predecessor deeply unpopular, and the war ended in an uneasy stalemate.

I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.

The Korean War was a gift from the Gods.

Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not felt a twinge of nostalgia for the cold war.

The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao's image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist.

With a book called 'Keeping Score,' I really did want to write a book about the Korean War, because I felt that it is the least understood war in the American cultural imagination. So I set out with the idea that Americans didn't know much about the Korean War and that I was going to try to fix a tiny bit of that.

The war against terror is every bit as important as our fight against fascism in World War II. Or our struggle against the spread of Communism during the Cold War.

The Korean war has always been an unpopular war among the American people.

My favorite period is World War II, and I'm in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era.

I proudly served in the United States Army during the Korean War as an artillery operations specialist in the all-black 503rd Field Artillery Battalion in the Second Infantry Division.

In 2006, when I had come very close to calling my agent and telling him I needed to take a break, NaNoWriMo was where I found my inspiration again.

I thought the Vietnam war was an utter, unmitigated disaster, so it was very hard for me to say anything good about it.

I got called back into the Navy during the Korean War.

Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.

With the World War II era, there's so much written material to draw on. When you go back to the 14th century, you have to imagine more.

Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican nominee in 1952, made a strong public commitment to ending the war in Korea, where fighting had reached a stalemate.

Unlike the Afghans and Iraqis, the South Korean people solidly supported the American military presence, which was part of a United Nations operation.

I was drafted during the Korean War.

I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21 because he promised to get us out of the Korean War.

After World War II society had to settle back for a moment before it picked up the 20th century.

What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that.

The Philippines was with the U.S. in the Second World War, in the Korean War, in the Vietnam War, and now in the war against terrorism.