I believe in the future a new Dante will write a new Divine Comedy.

My pen is alight and my body aflame. Until both burn down to ash, my love and my hate will remain here in the world.

I've lived on royalties all my life. It is the readers who have supported me.

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

I have spent myself on all kinds of things ... I have advanced much politically but I have written little and moreover have written it badly.

Nobody would say the cowshed was heaven and nobody would say the inhuman torture of so many victims be called a revolution of the proletariat. ... A museum should be established to remind China of the follies and disasters that had fallen from 1966 to 1976. We cannot forget what had happened and history should not repeat itself.

I am a person always full of contradictions... It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.