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.

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

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

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

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.

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

What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?