"It was my father’s dream that every child should be well-educated, well-fed and well-housed because he was a great believer that that was the equalizer of mankind. No matter what your background, no matter where you live or come from, if you have the opportunity of education, then you can become anything you want to become. And this was my father’s great dream and focus."

"I remember how shocked I was five years ago when Scarlett said to me, "You can never use the word fat again". And, wow, you were right. In my generation, calling someone "chubby" [was funny] ... in Love, Actually, there are endless jokes about that. I think I was behind the curve and those jokes aren't any longer funny. I don’t feel I was malicious at the time but I feel I was unobservant and not as clever as I should have been."

"Because I came from a very undiverse school and bunch of university friends, I think that I’ve hung on, on the diversity issue, to the feeling that I wouldn’t know how to write those parts. I think I was just sort of stupid and wrong about that. [...] I just don't know. I feel as though me, my casting director, my producers, just didn't think about it, just didn't look outwards enough."

"If their own blood relatives discarded, betrayed, forgot and harmed them, then they are our children, our sisters our mothers that we will mourn, we will remember, we will honour their memory and we will not forget!""

"Some anti-fascist protesters, the so-called "Antifa," use pepper spray against the marchers, including me."

"Change is possible, and I know, hope is very difficult to hold on to. But hope in this time, is actually, an act of defiance, it's an act of resistance. I refuse to dehumnaize those people who dehumanize me. Because, otherwise there is really no difference between us and people like them."

"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."

"[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."

"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."