A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

We are the storytelling animal.

When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.

I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, 'soul.'

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