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

Yiyun Li

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

More quotes by Yiyun Li

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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.
Yiyun Li
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If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.
Yiyun Li
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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
Yiyun Li
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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.
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.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
Yiyun Li
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
Yiyun Li
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
Yiyun Li
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
Yiyun Li
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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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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
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li