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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
Jail
Effective
Wouldn
Didn
Self
Would
Censor

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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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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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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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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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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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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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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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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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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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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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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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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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