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

I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.

The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance; death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.

I think the isolation in China also has to do with people's memories being wiped out, collective memories as well as individual memories, by the fact that the recent history has been constantly rewritten and revised.

The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground; his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han's memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else's disbelief.

You can write about a country without taking a stand, but you cannot write about a country without noting that there's history, and that there's politics going on. To me, that's the same if you write about America. You don't have to write about politics, but the politics have to be present in the characters.

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