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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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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Hero
Grew
Heroine
Call
Heroines
Learn
Regarding
Culture
Heroism
Someone
Villain
Way
Heroes
Time
Calling

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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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 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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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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