Xiaolu Guo

"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."