Quote

Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.

Yiyun Li

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Innocent
Capable
Crime
Persons
Person
Even
Cornered
Heartless

More quotes by Yiyun Li

Image
I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
Yiyun Li
Image
Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.
Yiyun Li
Image
To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
Yiyun Li
Image
Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
Yiyun Li
Image
There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
Yiyun Li
Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
Yiyun Li
Image
I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
Yiyun Li
Image
What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
Yiyun Li
Image
A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
Yiyun Li
Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
There are people who are willing to work within the system, and people who don't want to work with the system at all.
Yiyun Li
Image
It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
Yiyun Li