“It’s the place they take you before they give you over to the judicial system. You stay there for a year or two and they make you really suffer to confess everything.”

Otherwise, I think the building can be bigger, larger, and the city can be much more crazy. The problem is the government structure is so deadly stupid, not really solving problems but creating a lot of problems itself every day.

China is at a different stage of development, human rights are violated here much more often. And still, we see improvements even here.

You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.

I think optimism is whether you are still exhilarated by life, whether you are curious, whether you still believe there is possibility.

It [success] is really by mistake.

Destroy or build. Crazy or noncrazy. I’m not nostalgic about the old city. I don’t enjoy it that much.

Technology is a liberation. I think the information age probably is the best thing to happen to the human race in human evolution.

Of course, there [in China] has to be chaos. It has to be crazy, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong about it except this government, which is really incapable of doing anything meaningful.

This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society.

If there is no freedom of expression, then the beauty of life is lost. Participation in a society is not an artistic choice, it’s a human need.

I wouldn’t say I’ve become more radical: I was born radical.

I call on people to be ‘obsessed citizens,’ forever questioning and asking for accountability. That’s the only chance we have today of a healthy and happy life.

What is important is that we actively express our thoughts and wishes, in every realm that we can access.

The [China] government has improved in the last years. Of course, the structure is still the same; there’s still a one-party system and strong censorship.

Now many enterprises are made by individuals, so the attitude has started to change.

The whole Chinese system – not just the political leadership, the military too, the whole power structure, our education system, the whole of society – is suffering from being cut off from the free flow of information.

I’ve never made a video where I didn’t talk to the artist before I wrote the treatment.

It’s going to be over before a lot of us even know it started.

If someone who is tattooed dies in freedom, then he does so a few years before he would have committed murder.

She thinks that before her arrival on the scene no woman ever did anything worthwhile before

I’m not so talented at planning things out or having schedules before or sticking to the plan per se

To the lands I knew before you came, And the cool ocean breezes shall blow from me The memory of your name.

But just as we begin to enter on the history of physical changes going on before our eyes, and in which we ourselves bear a part,

Today, tomorrow,” she said. “A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.