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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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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Four
Harder
Working
Aren
Tell
Beginning
Back
Hundred
Firsts
Students
First
Realize
Rewrite
Really
Already
Finished
Always
Realizing
Pages

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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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
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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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 would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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.
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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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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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
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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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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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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.
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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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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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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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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