Quote

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

More quotes by 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.
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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
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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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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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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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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.
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.
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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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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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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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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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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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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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Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.
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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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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.
Yiyun Li