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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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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Pressure
Places
Society
Less
Political
Pressures
Also
Overall
America
Censorship
Self
China
More quotes by Yiyun Li
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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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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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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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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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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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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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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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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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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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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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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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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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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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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