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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.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Willing
System
Within
Work
People

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
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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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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
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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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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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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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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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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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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
Yiyun Li
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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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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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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
Yiyun Li
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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
Yiyun Li
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
Yiyun Li
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
Yiyun Li
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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