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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
Always
Realizing
Pages
Four
Harder
Working
Aren
Tell
Beginning
Back
Hundred
Firsts
Students
First
Realize
Rewrite
Really
Already
Finished

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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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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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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Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
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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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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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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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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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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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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.
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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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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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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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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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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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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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