China is more prosperous than before. The people have better lives but they are not happy and confident because the scars are still there.

If you have love, even plain cold water is sweet.

While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister.

I think because of their terrible past, particularly this century, the Chinese have come to accept cruelty more than many other people, which is something I feel very unhappy about

I remember when my mother pointed to a stone, and she said this was the kind of stone people used to place on the feet of the baby girls to stop them trying to climb away and unbind their feet.

What has marked Chinese society is its level of cruelty, not just revolutions and wars. We ought to reject it totally, otherwise in another upheaval there will be further cruelty.

When I was in China, Mao was Chairman, and parents were terrified to tell their children anything that differed from the party line in case the children repeated it and endangered the whole family.

When he asked my grandmother if she would mind being poor, she said she would be happy just to have her daughter and himself: 'If you have love, even plain water is sweet.

Although my book is banned I am still allowed to go to China and travel. There is no longer the kind of control that Mao used to have-there have been deep fundamental changes in society.

I would love mainland Chinese to read my book. There is a Chinese translation which I worked on myself, published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many copies have gone into China but it is still banned.

At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general.

Love what is simple and beautiful. These are the essentials.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

I'm here to take our message straight to the people.

I do not doubt but that genuine piety is the spring of peace of mind; it enables us to bear the sorrows of life, and lessens the pangs of death: the same cannot be said of hypocrisy.

You don't ever have to teach a kid to do wrong. You have to teach them to do right.

Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other. It will unriddle many riddles

It doesn't matter to me whether I write in a man's voice or a woman's, or first or third person for that matter. Those choices come down to the story and I just go with it.

Polygons are fashionable at the moment - particularly in the arcades.

It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance.