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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Describe
Chinese
Clouds
English
Never
Would
Fluffy
Cloud

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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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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 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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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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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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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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No one is immune from either taking the wrong action or not taking action at all, but the sense that something is completely out of a person's control is stronger in China.
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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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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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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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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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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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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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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 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.
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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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