Viet Thanh Nguyen quotes

As writers, of course we're interested in human beings, human stories, human trauma, and all that is very compelling for readers. But when we write these powerful stories about individual people, we have the illusion that we've made a difference. And of course we have-people read the books, they're touched emotionally by these kinds of stories, and that's great. But to the extent that the stories that we're telling are about people who are weaker, in some way-they come from a small country, or a forcibly removed population, they're underrepresented collectively-individual stories don't change the conditions that produce those refugees in the first place... (Viet Thanh Nguyen)
Implicitly, the novel insists that a true war story has to take into account not just combat and soldiers, but civilians, the home front, and the military-industrial complex. For me, war is more than guns and shooting. That's the spectacle that distracts us from how pervasive war is throughout a society and how it makes all of us complicit through things like paying taxes and watching horrifying images on TV without doing anything to stop them from happening... View quote
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Fiction and nonfiction accomplish very different things, but they can overlap. I wanted my fiction to seem nonfictional, and my nonfiction to seem fictional. At the same time, in fiction I could say things I couldn't get away with in nonfiction without footnotes. And in nonfiction, I could make things explicit that I couldn't say in fiction because of the viewpoint of my protagonist. View quote
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I follow in this tradition because I believe literature matters, and in this book I insist that Asian American literature literally embodies the contradictions, conflicts, and potential future options of Asian American culture. View quote
Viet Thanh Nguyen