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.

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.

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.

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

I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.

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

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.