114 quotes found
"I have the feeling there are two dates in history when the whole world seemed to be working together perfectly to achieve certain things, when it beat to the pulse of chaotic events that erupted everywhere simultaneously, as if by chance: 1969 and 1989."
"I feel the pride of being a Chinese everywhere, the Five-starred Red Flag is respected worldwide."
"I'm jealous that you are CCP [Communist Party of China] members. The CCP is really great. The CCP's promises don't take 100 years, they are fulfilled in decades. I want to be a CCP member."
"...in the 10 years after Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule ... I'm not sure if it's good to have freedom or not... If you're too free, you're like the way Hong Kong is now. It's very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic... I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we're not being controlled, we'll just do what we want."
"More than 120 takes. Those kinds of things ... You [say] "Wow, Jackie's good." It's not good. You can do it. Except, do you have the patience or not?"
"I could only see myself making a living through writing, as I had done in China. But should I write in Chinese here, a foreign land, or enrol in a language class and study English grammar? If I continued to write in Chinese I would have no readers here. Besides, I would never create a community of fellow artists and thinkers in my Western life while speaking Chinese."
"State censorship was an obvious assault on our creativity, but few Chinese writers actually acknowledge the serious and endemic issue of self-censorship. For me it was as clear as the operation of the state's apparatus – without self-censorship an artist in China would get nowhere and had no voice."
"I Am China is a parallel story about two Chinese lovers in exile – the external and internal exile that I had felt since leaving China."
"My growing environmental awareness only added more fuel to the argument for having no children. And the logic of never-ending consumption didn't just harm the environment, it killed people too."
"We now live in an age in which we are all information rich and experience poor."
"Nature both creates and destroys."
"[About Yayoi Kusama:] Classifying her work as 'art brut' is simplistic and unfair. For me she represents the history of womankind. A sexually violated, politically annihilated, socially ignored and emotionally deprived feminine life. One of her works is entitled Self Obliteration, which seems to sum up a woman's utter despair, in life, in art, in anything real in the human world."
"Since my childhood I have enjoyed reading Martial Arts fiction. I write it myself first and foremost for my own pleasure, and then for the pleasure of my readers (there is also, of course, the financial reward...). I am just a storyteller, like the professional storytellers of the Song dynasty. I believe Martial Arts fiction is like Peking Opera, or ballad-singing, or dancing, or music—its main function is to give pleasure."
"So whatever decision you make, you're going to be able to find stories or signs to say 'I did the right thing,' because we have to believe we did the right thing in order to survive."
"I think people have this romanticism of the homeland, and that’s just not the reality for me. Every time I go back to China, I feel more American than ever, so it’s this question of, ‘Well, where is home?’ We’re always searching for it and never fully fitting in."
"It’s so much easier to tell a fish-out-of-water story when the person is blond and blue-eyed going to an Asian country, for example. But what is it like when you look the same as those people, and you’re expected to fit in? How do you put that interiority on screen?"
"People are always asking me about the importance of representation and identity in relation to making The Farewell and of course those things are really important to me – thinking about my identity and exploring my identity in the west. But I would love it if men – white men – were also asked the same questions as me. They should be asked these questions so they can be more conscientious about how they’re representing people, how they’re not representing people, and aware of their own blind spots."
"In my family, and especially when I go back to China, it's always like, prepare your stomach, because it's the way that they express love."
"Sometimes America is so great because it brings all of us together, but sometimes it can be so limiting because it puts labels on things."
"Americans always talk about family love being unconditional, and I realized that I didn't feel that way."
"We all have different aspects of ourselves, and who we are to different people in our lives, at different stages of our lives."
"There have been moments where I laughed at my own family's culture, though it's hard to separate out whether something funny is cultural, or just my grandma specifically."
"There's so little representation of people who look like me behind the camera that it makes you want to say yes to any opportunity out of desperation. It puts you in a situation where you can't make your best work. Diversity for cheap."
"I can't speak for everybody, and I don't want to say it for an entire culture, but for me, coming from an immigrant family, it's very difficult to go find your voice, which requires a lot of failure."
"The questions I want to ask will revolve around humans, connection, relationships, family, and stories - what are the stories we tell ourselves and each other?"
"As someone once said: ‘Art is a never-ending dance of illusions’. It is impossible for us to dance exactly like we did before. What has really changed is not the films but the man on the floor."
"I like Latin American literature a lot and I’ve always thought Latin American, and Italian people are very close to Chinese, especially the women — jealousies, passion, family values, it’s very close."
"We all need stories. What happens in our daily lives changes our stories."
"Just make the film. Action is the first word you must learn. And the second is patience. As a filmmaker you must wait for many things. You have to wait for money, the weather, the cast, the release. So you need to have good patience. The process is so long and most of the time it’s frustrating. To be a filmmaker, you must first take action, then have the persistence to pursue it."
"It was my dream! I wanted to know what exactly martial arts is. When you look at martial arts films, the later ones became more and more exaggerated. It’s like, wow, is martial arts only a show?"
"You try to cope with the mass audience, but in fact you are not doing something for them—I would be fighting with myself. I thought, I don’t have to make big films, I can make small films that I can be happy with. I can find my own audience."
"Of course, people are more affected by actors or acting. But as a filmmaker, I need some logic. And this was my logic in making these two films, and how I connected these stories and these films together. People say my films don’t have any plot or storyline, but in my logic there is a storyline."
"We always put something in front of the camera because we wanted to create the feeling that the audience was one of the neighbors and was always observing or watching these two people. And the color is so vivid because everything from memory is vivid—it’s beautiful because it’s very close to your mind."
"Filmmaking is an organic process from start to finish, so there should be many surprises along the way. You never know what film you really have until it is delivered."
"When I was young, the idea of “world cinema” didn’t exist. We would watch any films that we could find in the cinemas. Today, some of those films have become accessible again on streaming platforms. In a way, it doesn’t matter as much where they exist as long as people have access to them."
"It takes less effort to stream a film at home these days. However, streaming should not fundamentally affect how a film is made, as long as the pleasure of watching films doesn’t change, and we as filmmakers continue to serve that purpose."
"I never want to make beautiful pictures. I just want to make sure it’s right. Every set up, every shot, represents a choice: what you want to see, and what you don’t want to see."
"In the last 10 years, a lot of kung-fu films have become over the top. And at a point, audiences start to think that kung-fu films are just a show, or a gimmick."
"My ideas about writing changed as soon as I started directing. As a writer, I wanted my scripts to be perfect and fully formed. As a director, I know there are always factors beyond my control. Many things in any film cannot be planned concretely in advance. The best you can do is visualise what you want, and then respond to what’s there once you go on set. Nowadays I start from a fairly loose script and tend to write the dialogue on the day of shooting."
"It goes back to when I was a teenager in China, being in a place where there are lies everywhere. You felt like you were never going to be able to get out. A lot of info I received when I was younger was not true, and I became very rebellious toward my family and my background. I went to England suddenly and relearned my history. Studying political science in a liberal arts college was a way for me to figure out what is real. Arm yourself with information, and then challenge that too."
"I love movies that don’t necessarily tell me how I should feel or how I should think but give me this canvas that I can go away and have a conversation with myself and people around me."
"I have gone through ups and downs in my relatively short career. And one thing I’ve learned is a bit of a cliché, but everything does happen for a reason."
"The one thing that I learned really early on is that you’ve got to surround yourself with the right people. Because you can’t change how people think — you can’t control how they’re going to think, how they’re going to behave. But what you can do is make sure the people that are around you not only protect you but want to be with you because of who you are as an individual. I’ve been lucky in my whole career so far. Every single film we’ve made, I’m surrounded by people like that."
"Someone I really respect and have been working with recently said to me, “You have to know that you have power. Know that you don’t have to fight so hard that you’re just on survival mode all the time. People around you are there to help you and they will be there when you fail. It’s okay to ask for help.”"
"I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I don’t think I can pinpoint why my upbringing or experiences have made me that way, but I have always been an outsider myself; it doesn’t matter where I went. I’m attracted to people who are on the periphery of society. I’ve been like this since high school. I liked mangas growing up and the ones I was drawn to were not about mainstream characters."
"Sometimes life drives you to a place… the road allows you to rediscover yourself."
"I don’t make films so that people can agree with me more. I make them to portray a character, a people or a way of life that people don’t know but that anyone can get to know. Then they can experience those things through their own conditioning and walk away with their own opinions and we can have a conversation about it. That’s the power of cinema. But if you stop me on the street to talk about politics, I’ll argue with you all day."
"But just by pointing the camera at something, you’re already making a statement of some kind. It’s inevitable, because you’re adding a perspective to it. I find that sometimes when I go into a community that’s not my own, or a community that has a lot of issues attached to it, I have to resist wanting to say something about how I think they could be better, or how I think the government has wronged them. A lot of times, they tell me what they think I want to hear because they’ve been interviewed many times by journalists. And usually, there’s something that these people who are interviewing them want them to say, because people go in with an agenda. I hear them saying things to me almost like they’re programmed to do it. You have to wait for that to be finished, and then you can ask, “What football team do you support?” or, “Tell me about your high school sweetheart.”"
"Making films is about communicating, and I am terrified that I will end up making films for people who already agree with me, which just keeps enforcing our own ideas. I’d rather have one person who disagrees with my politics watch my film, and then somehow see themselves in it without putting up a shield, than a whole room of people who already agree with me give me a standing ovation."
"I’m not the kind of filmmaker who just makes films. I have to be in love with my subject matter and want to learn more about it. Someone once said to me that passion doesn’t sustain, but curiosity does. I have to be excited by little things I discover along the way."
"But the truth is, you can never really be happy, because happiness is not an ultimate thing. Happiness is when your expectations are met with reality. If your expectation is constantly fed by the capitalist economy for its own survival, that you always need more, then you can never be as satisfied as the medieval farmer was satisfied with his piece of bread."
"I've been thinking a lot lately of how I keep going when things get hard. I think it goes back to something I learned when I was a kid. When I was growing up in China, my Dad and I used to play this game. We would memorise classic Chinese poems and texts, and we would recite them together and try to finish each other's sentences."
"There's one that I remember so dearly, it's called the Three Character Classics. The first phrase goes... 'People at birth are inherently good.' Those six letters had such a great impact on me when I was a kid, and I still truly believe them today."
"Even though sometimes it might seem like the opposite is true, I have always found goodness in the people I met, everywhere I went in the world. So this is for anyone who had the faith, and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves, and to hold on to the goodness in each other, no matter how difficult is to do that. And this is for you. You inspire me to keep going."
"You could watch her script adapt to the personalities and stories that came from those conversations. You could see her listening to these individuals telling their stories, and then collaborating with them to fold their own narratives into the script. Chloé really allows people to choose how they want to represent themselves. The safety of fiction filmmaking, in my opinion, actually pulls out a level of honesty and authenticity that I think would be impossible if this was a documentary purporting to truth."
"Sometimes people feel like they are not important enough to be in a movie. Once they meet Chloé, they open up. She makes people feel special. Chloé truly wants to hear their story and she wants them to tell it."
"This year, a female ethnic Chinese director got the awards, but even keywords related to her cannot be seen on social media. This is extremely lame."
"People at birth, are inherently good. Their natures are similar, it’s the sensitive characters in their names that make them different. Congratulations to director Chloé Zhao!"
"Instead of celebrating Chloé Zhao's wins at the Oscar and making the Chinese public feeling proud, Beijing is busy censoring her -- all for a criticism she made in 2013. For as long as I've been writing about Chinese censorship and propaganda, I still can't wrap my mind around it."
"Films directed by Chloé Zhao"
"I have lived on my own since 1963. It doesn’t mean I haven’t had a sex life."
"I’m tough but my heart is very soft."
"I don’t know how to bargain. Most Chinese are good at it. I am not. I am too lazy. You need to have good arithmetic and I don’t. I hate gambling, which is almost a national sport. And I don’t think I would keep the money."
"Another problem for minority actors is that we don’t often work with beautiful dialogue. And there were less chances of working with great directors and actors. That’s when you can learn a lot."
"Lots of little old ladies potter in their gardens. For me it is my library. It has every subject about China I can collect, and of course about theatre."
"I always tell my students that I’m teaching them to be more confident. That’s why you come to acting class. I say, “If you aim at a tall tree, you may hit a bush. If you aim at a bush, you’ll hit that floor.” I find that some actors just don’t try enough. They may not like it when I say that."
"See, a lot of people think freedom means you can do anything you want. That’s not true. The more freedom you have, the more responsibility you have. My life has always been about freedom and independence. And in some ways, acting has too. What is so great about acting is that after 62 years, suddenly the technique is in you already. You don’t have to think about it anymore. Suddenly you’re free."
"I don’t like to be called “Mrs.” because I am not married, and I only belong to myself. I admire and respect people who have been successfully married for a long time, but I cannot do it. So I decided to never marry again."
"You can control the audience. You can make the audience so happy one minute, and so sad the next minute. In film, it’s up to the directors to cut it well. Sometimes an actor may not give a very good performance, but the editor does a good job."
"You are only famous for ten years, unless you’re a superstar. Because another generation comes through and you’re forgotten."
"It seems that several countries are paying more and more attention to women filmmakers, because in the past all the directors in those countries were men, and women have encountered many problems in trying to become directors. But in China, I feel that problem has never existed. In this respect, men and women have always had equal opportunities. In other countries, women feel a need to emphasize what they've been through, but in China things are different. I feel that what many of the films made in China in the past lacked was individuality and character. They were all rather cliched and publicized policies for the authorities. You can't see the character of the artist, male or female. So, in making films, my primary motivation is to express myself, and in expressing myself, it's very natural that my being a woman should be part of that. (discussing western scholarship of gender as not being useful in distinguishing Chinese films, and highlighting differences between the Chinese and Western film industries)"
"During filming, it never occurred to me that I was going to be a part of either film. I was always trying to cut my voice out by having subjects include my question in their answers."
"The most repressed countries often produce some of the most amazing films. I think that it will push people to find a way to express their ideas in new ways."
"We all like to believe that our world has clear heroes and villains and that the heroes are going to save us after all, but that’s not the reality."
"I’m pretty pessimistic about the Chinese government because I think there is no balance within it or any institution, country or organization that can hold it accountable. So, I don’t know what the future will be."
"I think the first step of any change comes from the people who live in China. And that's why I think the most important impact I hope that documentaries would have is to change people's perception. Because personally, I experienced how I have learned so much, and unlearned so much, about what I was taught growing up about China."
"People in China who praise the government despite that they have family that died from Covid because of the lack of medical response and lack of care from the government, but they still say they are appreciative of the government, I look at those people and they could be my family or my friends. I would never look at them with disgust or contempt or as morally superior. I understand how they became that and how they got their information, how their ideology was formed."
"There is a difference between disinformation and misinformation. Disinformation is somebody giving the wrong information but unknowingly. They did not know it was wrong, so maybe they could say they are working with the information they had at the time but it’s still wrong. Misinformation is intentionally spreading wrong information. At what point the disinformation turned to misinformation is really hard to go back and find. The people who are at the level of government, whose responsibility it is to present transparency and truthful information, those people need to be held accountable for giving inaccurate information."
"Misinformation is just like a virus. There is an origin. It’s hard to find where the origin is, but it starts with a small group of people and it takes human hosts to spread from person to person. All the people who voted for Trump or believed that COVID didn’t exist, you need to go back to see where did it start and how long have we ignored that. I do want people to look at it, and not to place judgement but to look beyond those superficial issues."
"I’m conscious what things were not positive. And I, as a storyteller, as a filmmaker, and as a citizen, I felt that it’s my responsibility to expose that and to reveal that, to raise awareness so people could see. That’s the only way I feel you could really push the country to move forward, to improve, and hold the authorities accountable."
"We all want certain things. We all want transparency. We all want accurate information. And especially with the experience of coming from China, knowing how somebody could firmly believe in something that was not true. I would never look at any of the subjects in China who say they love, they admire, they appreciate Xi Jinping and they appreciate what the Chinese government does with contempt or with disgust. I would never do that. Because I know what they came from, and I know what made this happen."
"I think empathy is not learned. Maybe I’m wrong, but in my experience it’s not."
"Memory is the central part of the individual identity… and I think that’s true with a nation, too. What a nation is how the nation remembers its past, and with the authoritarian government in China, so far recent history has been written in the authorities’ narrative; how they came into power, and what has happened since they came into power, have been revised in a way that fits into the official narrative."
"Our goal was to make a film that in 50 or 100 years will survive as a reliable account of what really happened during the one-child policy. It can serve as a rebuttal to the official narrative, which in China already is pure propaganda. Even outside of China, many people we’ve spoken with have told us how surprised they were by the details of the film, which shows how effective the propaganda promoting the policy truly has been."
"The biggest challenge we faced during post-production was how to integrate all the different elements involved in the film. The topic of the one-child policy and its consequences are massive and complex. We went through a lot of trial and error to decide which characters to include and how to transit from my personal and family story to a larger national and international story."
"Fiction film is really different from documentary in this aspect. It is less objective, because the director expresses a subjective point of view with the movie. I would like the movie to look like a documentary, look real."
"Using “realistic style” does not mean that we have to change and make a documentary film. It remains fiction. When I make movies, it is subjective, my own interpretation of the novel, my way of organizing the movie scenes. The director’s reflection is not objective, because we are expressing our own point of view, and from the angle of what interests us."
"It is true that I was a cinematographer, so for me, the narration of the spectacular is powerful and important. I always pay special attention to the expression of the pictures. It has always been my style."
"I think being popular is a tool instead of a purpose. One has to use a tool to express what he wants to express. Movies from the West, sometimes, are using this as a purpose, for a high market value. Their movies are made to be trendy, so that they could attract a great number of people. And in turn, they will make money that way. This is a universal feature in the industry. But for me I do not feel that it is enough if you just want to make something so that it will be popular. I have to express what I want to say. I probably would refuse to make such a film. To cast a movie, I have to find myself, to express what I want to say. Being popular, for me, is a process to make more and more people accept your ideas. For the movies I make, I try my best to make them popular, to make the audience accept it naturally. This is important. But I do not mean the other extreme, to only express what you want to say and neglect the public. This could end up as something just cherished by the artist. I think we are part of the mass, not higher than other people. I do not think possessing the quality of being popular is something lose face over. It is a style. It would work for the movies if and only if I am able to express what I want to say, and use popularity as a tool."
"Each person has his or her own point of view. However, if a jury likes a movie, this does not always mean that it is a good movie. It only reflects the view of the jury members. On the other hand, China is a developing country. The juries probably are curious about something they have never seen, something authentic, something that is hard to find in their society. The different living condition of each country defines how we see them and how they see us."
"As I said, a work should be unique in idea. I think many Hollywood movies reflect a simple world outlook. Instead of putting emphasis on the breakthrough of the content, the symbolic aspect, they stress other entertainment elements to attract an audience, such as sensational approach and a high technological skill. They carry a high price tag, and sometimes are very well done, with love scenes and action. But in terms of artistic value, the symbolic meaning of the movies, some of them, not all, are kept plain. They may just draw lines of moral value, such as struggles between good and evil, something we are educated about once and for all in high school. I think movies should have more than just these, they should touch more varieties of the society, different aspects of life, and reflect people. They are more for development, more to explore. Of course this is only my personal view, each person may have their own view."
"Even an adaptation of a good literary work must first become a film; it can't be a copy of literature. An adaptation doesn't have to be like the original work, and it should be filmic. The first thing I do is simplify its events-simplify and popularize them. Film goes by only once, and its form of viewing is compelling. There's no time to go back, or turn back and reflect. You have no choice but to go along with the screen. Sometimes in literary language one or two sentences are very refined and charming. You can repeatedly try to figure them out, and once you've reached the last chapter, you could even rummage back to reflect on earlier points in the book. A film goes by only once, and not many ordinary people will see it two or three times. The rest of the viewing space is black and silent-the only thing with light and sound is the screen. The audience has no choice but to move along with the film's time, and because of this, films shouldn't be too complicated."
"If a nation wants to develop toward the future, if it wants to be powerful and prosperous or influential, it simply has to have a vitality and burning passion toward life. No matter how much you suffer and no matter how tragic your fate, you need courage to live. This courage can't be worn away; otherwise, humanity would have no way of moving forward or developing toward the future. I think that several thousand years of humanity have also relied upon this kind of courage-an unceasing desire and vitality toward controlling one's own destiny. Every person hopes that his or her life will get better and better; this idea underlies everything. This is a critique of the modern mentality of Chinese people. Even though a country may be poor-its people poverty-stricken with all kinds of problems and much suffering-if people want to live, they should live to their hearts content, and they should have spiritual passion."
"Good films have had influence on us. To say that they haven't is to talk nonsense. No one lives in a vacuum. I believe that the world's great masters, geniuses, and super-genius have always been the products of their times, that they've been influenced by the overall creative atmosphere of their times. Regardless of whether they want to be like other people or not, they've all been influenced."
"I believe a great film has to be, first of all, artistic. It has to be beautifully done. Nowadays there are just so many films and TV shows out there that it's like fast food. And there's no strong artistic element to it. And secondly, a great film has to be deep. It has to be impactful. And tell an amazing story."
"We need to strike a balance between the visuals and the story itself. And for me, I believe the story is the most important thing. And then secondly it's the artistic style. Because if we don't have a great story, it's all about the visual and the appearance and then it'll be too superficial and too shallow."
"The problem is that Hollywood is competition for Chinese art films. So I thought I should make a film with box office promise, that refers to Chinese culture, but also contains an art element."
"Chinese moviegoers appreciate a good balance, so we should try to achieve a perfect combination of content and visual impact; those would be the best works. Having said that, visual movies can have an extraordinarily strong impact, so I believe that visuals deserve a lot of attention as well."
"It's hard to tell where inspiration comes from. Very often, it comes when you least expect it. Perhaps you get a tiny detail or specific image in your mind and you find that image beautiful. Or sometimes, inspiration comes from another person, something that another person says or does moves you. You find yourself touched and the feelings give you an idea you can use and develop. And sometimes the ideas come from watching other people's works or movies because I really love to go to movies myself."
"I would say I tend to adopt a more affirmative approach to women because many of my works are dealing with the theme of anti-feudalism. So I have used a lot of historical themes in my works, you know the Chinese culture and the Chinese tradition. The man and the father are dominant in both society and family, and a lot of pressure is put on the female, and I wanted to reflect that."
"I have always hoped that Asian movies can enjoy better development and can enjoy a better position in relation to the rest of the world. I'm sure this is the hope and goal of all movie directors in Asia."
"I think my experience represents a wealth of assets for my life and my work. During the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, I was 16 to 26 years old. I experienced a lot of chaotic situations, and saw a lot of tragic things around me. So that deep understating of human life, of human society really benefits me today - in the way it affects my work, my thinking or even how I deal with my problems. You know, when I'm looking at different types of movies, I tend to think more about human life, about the human spirit, about the human heart. That's from my past experience that's still very deeply rooted in me."
"I have seen a lot of films, but no Western filmmaker has ever had a great impact or influence on me. We always feel there is a great gap between Chinese films and Western films. Western films are far more advanced, but we don’t feel any shock about this gap. It seems natural."
"“What happened to her books?” “They went up in smoke. Confiscated by the Red Guards, who promptly burnt them in public, right in front of her apartment building.”"
"We had been so unlucky. By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read."
"Four-Eyes’s parents probably wanted their son to be a writer. They must have thought it would be good for him to read books, even if he had to do so in secret."
"Picture, if you will, a boy of nineteen, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden from me."
"I hadn’t suspected that a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly."
"It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children."
"Inside, piles of books shown in the light of our torch: a company of great Western writers welcomed us with open arms. On top was our old friend Balzac, with five or six novels, then came Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Dumas, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Romain Rolland, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and some English writers, too: Dickens, Kipling, Emily Brontë… We were beside ourselves. My head reeled, as if I’d had too much to drink. I took the novels out of the suitcase one by one, opened them, studied the portraits of the authors, and pass them on to Luo. Brushing them with the tips of my fingers made me feel as if my pale hands were in touch with human lives. “It reminds me of a scene in a film,” said Luo. “You know, when a stolen suitcase turns out to be stuffed with money…” “So, are you weeping tears of joy?” I said. “No. All I feel is loathing.” “Me too. Loathing for everyone who kept these books from us.”"
"I kept my door more securely locked than ever and passed the time with foreign novels. Since Balzac was Luo’s favourite I put him to one side, and with the ardour and earnestness of my eighteen years I fell in love with one author after another: Flaubert, Gogol, Melville, and even Romain Rolland."
"I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same."
"Every nook and cranny of the land came under the all-seeing eye of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which had cast its gigantic, fine-meshed net over the whole of China."
"She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price."