Religion was their meat and their excitement, their mental food and their emotional pleasure.

The community must assume responsibility for each child within its confines. Not one must be neglected whatever his condition. The community must see that every child gets the advantages and opportunities which are due him as a citizen and as a human being.

No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.

What a man does in his own house cannot concern the nation.

It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.

Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung

It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.