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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
Hope
Write
Ends
Must
Muddling
Writing
Amidst
Struggling
Someday
Struggle

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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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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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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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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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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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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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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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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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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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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
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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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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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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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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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