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.

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.

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

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 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.

We had to think differently to do what must be done.

You cannot forever hide your true face in the shade

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.

One of my passions is photography. I always carry a camera in my bag whenever I travel. I always take pictures wherever I go, and some of them end up being really crazy ones.

The most simple way to stay encouraged is to feed your heart on what He is doing, not on what He hasn't done. If you can't see what He is doing, feed on what He has done in the past.

The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.

The miser is as much in want of what he has as of what he has not.

The data show we can do something about upward mobility. Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter.

There's nothing regular about my life at all, really. I don't keep a regular schedule and every day is different. It's all rather chaotic.