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
Faces
Smaller
Bigs
Lifts
Become
Fish
Fishes
Bigger
Pay
Ones
Fatter
Face
Lift

More quotes by Yiyun Li

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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.
Yiyun Li
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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.
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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
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
Yiyun Li
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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
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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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I always tell my students to go back after a hundred pages and rewrite from the beginning. It's really harder if you've already finished four hundred pages and realize the first hundred aren't working.
Yiyun Li
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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
Yiyun Li
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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
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
Yiyun Li
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If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
Yiyun Li
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
Yiyun Li
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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
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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.
Yiyun Li
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
Yiyun Li
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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
Yiyun Li