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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Look
Think
Thinking
Trained
Eyes
Eye

More quotes by Yiyun Li

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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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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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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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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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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 would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
Yiyun Li
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If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.
Yiyun Li
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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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.
Yiyun Li
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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