Quote

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

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Way
Novel
Always
Ready
World
Came
Happy
Saddened
Character
Ending
Children
Keeping
Writing
Characters
Really
Safe

More quotes by 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.
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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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If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.
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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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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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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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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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She wonders if this is what people call falling in love, the desire to be with someone for every minute of the rest of her life so strong that sometimes she is frightened of herself.
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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.
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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
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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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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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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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