I wanted to analyse and understand how the Chinese people could have their lives so crushed by fear.

Beijing Coma took me 10 years to finish.

Only when you are aware of the uniqueness of everyones individual body will you begin to have a sense of your own self-worth.

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.

Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will belies waiting on the road ahead.

I believe that the power of literature is stronger than the power of tyranny.

China is completely lacking in self-awareness and as someone who has stepped outside that society, I have a responsibility to write about it as I see it.

I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually.

Tyrannies not only want to control your mind and thoughts but your flesh as well.

What we mean by Tao is the way or course of Nature. This way has nothing good or bad, it is a mere flowing of things following the development and decline attributes of the moment.

The literal meaning of the Chinese characters for revolution is elimination of life

May the scribes record it.

Vultures pick the meat clean off a bone. Guilt eats at the marrow, leaving a man hollow.

I hadn't done just a straight-out comedy in a long time, just letting an ensemble do really good character acting, having them carry the movie as in my earlier pictures

Germany and France are pinning their hopes on young people, in terms of education, science and innovation.

Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality.

Whatever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves... how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers.

It was sad, the imbalance of it all. Why do kids assume so much from one parent and hold the other to a lower, looser standard?

A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators.

Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.

Julie always tried to stand beside me, or talk to me, or in some other way mortify me.