I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.

One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.

In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.

If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.

Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.