“Life is much more interesting when you make a little bit of effort.”

The rest of the world understands little about China’s changes and the possibilities and crises that come with them.

To the media, I have become a symbolic figure, critical of China. According to the government, I am a dangerous threat.

Hopefully, other successes aren’t like me. It carries much more meaning to other people; my success story is irrelevant. It doesn’t make any sense.

Each year, more people want to become artists.

Today, we jump into this globalization of the economy and the internet age.

Nationality and borders are barriers to our intelligence, to our imagination and to all kinds of possibilities.

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.

From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.

One man in a meeting, filled with unbelief, can make a place for the devil to have a seat.

It’s a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.

Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure–wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.

I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way.

If you want to make a permanent change, stop focusing on the size of your problems and start focusing on the size of you!

I feel like I’ve always wanted to live in one place and stay in one place, but I always end up choosing things that make me travel.