It's so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they're always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.

Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it.... The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you.

Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.

There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.

Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.

Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'