I was brought up in a household where you stood up to be counted.

If you want to know a country, read its writers.

All liars ... lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth.

War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.

What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that.

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.

I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.

Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?

A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.

What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.

For every blissful moment you must an anguish meet.

To continue holding on to your grudges is to keep feeding your pain.

A psychologist would probably diagnose insanity for a nation that spends more on its military than the next 8 nations combined, while its poor are starving.

There never was night that had no morn.

I would like to bury all the hating eyes under the sand somewhere.

Many a man who might walk over burning ploughshares into heaven stumbles from the path because there is gravel in his shoes.

I don't like schools. And I mean, you have to call on all your friends to get them into their schools.

The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization.

You don't really need modernity in order to exist totally and fully. You need a mixture of modernity and tradition.

I've been approached to do some things with astronauts and the preparation that astronauts go through.