Quote

If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.

Yiyun Li

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
Yiyun Li
Image
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
Image
It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
Yiyun Li
Image
To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
Yiyun Li
Image
Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
Yiyun Li
Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
Yiyun Li
Image
I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
Yiyun Li
Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
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
Image
There are people who are willing to work within the system, and people who don't want to work with the system at all.
Yiyun Li
Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
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.
Yiyun Li
Image
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
Image
There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
Yiyun Li
Image
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
Image
Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
Yiyun Li
Image
Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.
Yiyun Li
Image
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