Writer Quotes

Red Dust was about the late 1980s; it was a time of burgeoning hopes and opening up and people searching for new ways.

My hope is that the Chinese government will come to realise that it is futile to repress free speech, and that contrary to what they believe a regime's strength rests not its suppression of a plurality of opinions and ideas, but in its capacity and willingness to encourage them.

Living in London is like being on a luxury cruise liner.

It is vitally important for me, both personally and for my writing, to be able to return to China freely, so being barred entry has caused me deep concern and distress.

In February of this year I returned to China to research my next book. The authorities know about the novels of mine that have been published in the west, including the latest one, Beijing Coma, about a student shot in Tiananmen Square, but so far have allowed me to return.

In 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square with the students, living in their makeshift tents and joining their jubilant singing of the Internationale. In the two decades since, each time that I have gone back, visions from those days seem to return with increasing persistence.

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

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

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.

Beijing Coma took me 10 years to finish.

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

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

I meant that the Chinese people are not aware of their own entrapment. They believe they live in a free society, but don't realize how much they are being monitored and controlled, how much the information they receive is restricted and warped, until they step out of line, that is, and feel the heav

To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons.

I know nothing about platonic love except that it is not to be found in the works of Plato.

You can judge a leader by the size of the problem he tackles. Other people can cope with the waves, it's his job to watch the tide.

The Opposition aren't really the Opposition. They're just called the Opposition. But in fact they are the Opposition in exile. The Civil Service are the Opposition in residence.

'Referring the matter to a committee' can be a device for diluting authority, diffusing responsibility and delaying decisions.

Men grow to the stature to which they are stretched when they are young.

He's suffering from Politicians' Logic. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it.

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.

You know, people always talk about how Jesus came down to Earth as a human being. He became a human being, But no one ever takes into account what that means.

If there's a God, and we have all this evidence that there's evolution, but He created the world only 6,000 years ago - what is the best and most logical explanation to reconcile those two things? I came up with - He came up with it, of course - that all things are fakeable.

I spent 11 years at 'The Daily Show,' and I learned everything there about how to write funny, how to write funny on topic.

As a Jew reading about Jesus, I thought, 'He's a pretty good guy.' It's the same conclusion Monty Python drew in 'Life of Brian' - if people actually live what he did, it would be a pretty good world. But Jesus and Christianity have a tenuous relationship at best.

We believe... that the applause of silence is the only kind that counts.

The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.

It is conventional to call 'monster' any blending of dissonant elements. I call 'monster' every original inexhaustible beauty.

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.