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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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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Effective
Wouldn
Didn
Self
Would
Censor
Jail

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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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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
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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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There are people who are willing to work within the system, and people who don't want to work with the system at all.
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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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Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
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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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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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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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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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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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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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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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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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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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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