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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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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Writing
Amidst
Struggling
Someday
Struggle
Hope
Write
Ends
Must
Muddling

More quotes by 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.
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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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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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.
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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
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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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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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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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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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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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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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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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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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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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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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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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