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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
Society
Less
Political
Pressures
Also
Overall
America
Censorship
Self
China
Pressure
Places

More quotes by 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.
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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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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 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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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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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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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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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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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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