Quote

Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Fishes
Bigger
Pay
Ones
Fatter
Face
Lift
Faces
Smaller
Bigs
Lifts
Become
Fish

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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.
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Almost all of the stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan are told in the first person, yet, depending on the angle and distance of the narrator, they exert different effects. The best are those in which the speaker never poses as an objective outsider. (...) Other stories are damaged by the urge to distance the narrator.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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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.
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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Overall there may be less censorship in America than in China, but censorship and self-censorship are not only from political pressure, but also pressures from other places in a society.
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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.
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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
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The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han's memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else's disbelief.
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But loneliness is as delusive a belief in the pertinence of the world as is love: in choosing to feel lonely, as in choosing to love, one carves a space next to oneself to be filled by others - a friend, a lover, a toy poodle, a violinist on the radio.
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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.
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If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.
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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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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.
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In film, you have to present everything on the screen so it's the opposite of what I usually do with storytelling. It forced me to think about how people walk, where they sit at that moment. With Princess of Nebraska, it was just fun to watch because the movie was so far from the story. It was very much a different story.
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