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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

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Way
Whose
Orphan
Would
Effort
Spoil
Love
Success
Imagined
Mother
Earn
Kindhearted
Women
Opposite
Pang
Littles
Opposites
Nanny
Little
Loving
Nannies
Great
Exactly
Spoils

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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.
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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.
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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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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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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
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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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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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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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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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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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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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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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Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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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Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
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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.
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There are people who are willing to work within the system, and people who don't want to work with the system at all.
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