Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.

What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance; if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.

Your characters are always your children. And while you are writing, you're keeping them safe. Now they're ready to go into the world and it's sad. I'm happy with the way the novel came out but all the characters' ending really saddened me.

Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.

Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.

One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story; you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier.

Almost all of the stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan are told in the first person, yet, depending on the angle and distance of the narrator, they exert different effects. The best are those in which the speaker never poses as an objective outsider. (...) Other stories are damaged by the urge to distance the narrator.