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

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

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.

It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.

Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.

I always tell my students to go back after a hundred pages and rewrite from the beginning. It's really harder if you've already finished four hundred pages and realize the first hundred aren't working.

Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.