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

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

In film, you have to present everything on the screen so it's the opposite of what I usually do with storytelling. It forced me to think about how people walk, where they sit at that moment. With Princess of Nebraska, it was just fun to watch because the movie was so far from the story. It was very much a different story.

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.

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.

There are people who are willing to work within the system, and people who don't want to work with the system at all.

Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.