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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
Never
Would
Fluffy
Cloud
Describe
Chinese
Clouds
English

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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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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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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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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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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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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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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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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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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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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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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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But loneliness is as delusive a belief in the pertinence of the world as is love: in choosing to feel lonely, as in choosing to love, one carves a space next to oneself to be filled by others - a friend, a lover, a toy poodle, a violinist on the radio.
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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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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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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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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
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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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