“I never really read Allen Ginsberg poetry, even though I have a book he gave me.”

I don’t like China. Even today, I still feel I have no emotional relations with this place.

A state like China looks so powerful, but they are so scared of the Internet, so the Internet is more powerful than them.

Even if I have hundreds of things to do, the disconnected feeling is still there because it is very hard to find a real purpose of life.

It is not an easy job to govern China, I am aware of that. There are crises and emergencies all the time, we might not even be aware of some. But I am afraid we’ll have to wait and observe precisely what the government is up to.

It is not an easy job to govern China, I am aware of that.

How to become a really modern society when today we are so – as a human being, we feel so powerful. We have high technology and a superb way of controlling our life. And at the same time, in many ways we are so primitive.

You only have temporary curiosity, amusement, and challenges, but that does not necessarily mean you are really convinced that it’s necessary or that it’s not even worth to do it.

The jobs for 7 million university graduates every year, the immense corruption: Even some Western governments would have to scramble to find solutions to such problems.

Choices after waking up: To be true or to lie? To take action or be brainwashed? To be free or be jailed?

No state or society can claim to have established human rights once and for all.

There’s no such thing as “fixed” culture. China is also becoming more global. Its problems are becoming international problems, becoming German problems, becoming American problems.

It also makes humanity much more safe. If we see pureness somewhere as something to be desired, the trouble starts.

I never think any place is better than others.

Society becomes very destructive.

Creativity is the power to act.

We are not on – even just a step away from the most brutal and primitive crudity. To be very crude on those issues, which is always challenges and we always have to look at the situation like a mirror, to draw some understanding.

As I go across the country and privately visit women’s shelters and counselling centres.

These objects were sometimes just 12 inches across yet needed enough detail to fill a movie screen.

You taste something from St. George, even across categories – the gin, the whisky – it tastes like something from St. George. It’s the same as going to a great bar:

Reading across three languages is a way for me to diversify my intake as a reader, not to tunnel into certain categories or demographics.

Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes.

Millions cheer the warriorspilling blood across the ringwhile the one who stands for peaceis ridiculed and shamed.

Well, sometimes if I go out to dinner with my family, people will come up to me and put their hand across my plate for me to shake, sometimes when I have a bite of food in my mouth.

They speak across different dividing lines such as those of haves and have-nots, youth and maturity, black and white, national and global, and the past and the present.