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

perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.

We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.

Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?

Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.