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

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.

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

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.

and tonight we held each other, one last time, like a dance to aslow songon an empty floor, underneath a singledisco ballin front of no oneat all

There’s more to life than increasing its speed.

One last song. One last turn. One last street. no matter how hard you try to keep hold of a day, it's going to leave you

When I see my mom in the stands, it always pushes me to succeed.

You can't go back; I can't go back either, but we can go on.

The Steinway piano is such an incomparable instrument. Due to its virtues, I am able to express all my musical feelings.

Is magic not enough to live for?

Everyone has a desire, if not a need, to use their individual signatures. Whenever people meet to talk about a project, even stuffy old businessmen, they say they want to create something new.

The New York Times published the guest list on the front page. The masks were a brilliant concept.

I would have preferred to capture bin Laden and expose how he uses Islamic ideology for his own purposes.