Yiyun Li Quotes

Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.

What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?

It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else’s life.

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.

Chinese people don’t care about freedom, but they do care about justice.

There are people who are willing to work within the system, and people who don’t want to work with the system at all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some people in China don’t look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.

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.