Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.

If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.

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

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.

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

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.