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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
Yiyun Li
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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Wrong
Place
Every
Good
Time
Goes
More quotes by Yiyun Li
If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.
Yiyun Li
You can write about a country without taking a stand, but you cannot write about a country without noting that there's history, and that there's politics going on. To me, that's the same if you write about America. You don't have to write about politics, but the politics have to be present in the characters.
Yiyun Li
Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
Yiyun Li
It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
Yiyun Li
The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.
Yiyun Li
Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
Yiyun Li
I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
Yiyun Li
Why do I write about China? That is a very good question. I think there are questions about China that I haven't been able to answer. The reason I write is that there are questions to which I want to find answers - or I want to find questions beyond those questions.
Yiyun Li
To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
Yiyun Li
Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
Yiyun Li
She wonders if this is what people call falling in love, the desire to be with someone for every minute of the rest of her life so strong that sometimes she is frightened of herself.
Yiyun Li
Regarding heroism, I grew up in a culture where you learn about heroes and heroines all the time. In a way, when you call someone a hero or heroine, it's the same as calling them a villain.
Yiyun Li
One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier.
Yiyun Li
I think the isolation in China also has to do with people's memories being wiped out, collective memories as well as individual memories, by the fact that the recent history has been constantly rewritten and revised.
Yiyun Li
Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.
Yiyun Li
No one is immune from either taking the wrong action or not taking action at all, but the sense that something is completely out of a person's control is stronger in China.
Yiyun Li
A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
Yiyun Li
Your characters are always your children. And while you are writing, you're keeping them safe. Now they're ready to go into the world and it's sad. I'm happy with the way the novel came out but all the characters' ending really saddened me.
Yiyun Li
Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.
Yiyun Li
Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
Yiyun Li