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
Children
Keeping
Writing
Characters
Really
Safe
Way
Novel
Always
Ready
World
Came
Happy
Saddened
Character
Ending

More quotes by 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.
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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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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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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If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.
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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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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 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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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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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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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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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.
Yiyun Li
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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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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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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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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