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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
Firsts
Students
First
Realize
Rewrite
Really
Already
Finished
Always
Realizing
Pages
Four
Harder
Working
Aren
Tell
Beginning
Back
Hundred
More quotes by Yiyun Li
Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
Yiyun Li
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
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
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.
Yiyun Li
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
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
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
If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.
Yiyun Li
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
Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
Yiyun Li
There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
Yiyun Li
It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
Yiyun Li
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
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.
Yiyun Li
Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
Yiyun Li
To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
Yiyun Li
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
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.
Yiyun Li
What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
Yiyun Li
I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
Yiyun Li
