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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

More quotes by Yiyun Li

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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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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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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 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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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
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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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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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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.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
Yiyun Li
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
Yiyun Li
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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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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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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.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li