You strive to have a good heart. But what is a heart? Just a chunk of flesh that a dog can eat.

I don't think of myself as a dissident, and I'm more of an immigrant than an exile.

We can't continue to be like this. Who am I? Your fiancée or your concubine?

English has more flexibility. It's a very plastic, very shapeable, very expressive language. In that sense it feels quite natural.

Without writing, what would I have become? Nothing. In China the individual used to be treated as a screw or a small cog in the revolutionary machine. I wanted to be a human being with a voice.

Indifference is the strongest contempt.

When the first emperor wanted to unify the country, one of the major policies was to create one system of written signs. By force, brutal force, he eliminated all the other scripts. One script became the official script. All the others were banned. And those who used other scripts were punished severely. And then the meanings of all the characters, over the centuries, had to be kept uniform as a part of the political apparatus. So from the very beginning the written word was a powerful political tool.