Zhang Yimou is always going to need young, pretty girls for his films. But I don't really concern myself with what Zhang Yimou's next starlet looks like.

I wanted to become a kindergarten teacher like my mother.

In China, we don't consider someone truly beautiful until we have known them for a long time, and we know what's underneath the skin.

For myself I don't like the geisha look. It's like a mask.

There's nothing in Chinese culture that is an equivalent of the geisha. It's so different, so special to Japan.

I want, through my roles, to express the parts in the hearts of Chinese women that they feel unable to let out.

I don't care if you love me or not. I'll love you anyway.

The atmosphere at my school was very competitive. Young girls were competing with each other every day for status, for leadership, for the affection of the teachers. I hated it.

I'm not really interested in politics, because I think it's just too removed from my own life. If there's a war, though, or a disaster, I want to know what's happening.

Actually I ran away from school when I was 13. No one could find me, and the police were called. I was just hiding in a little thicket of grass at my school, and went to sleep.

I wanted to escape so badly. But of course I knew I couldn't just give up and leave school. It was only when I heard my mom's voice that I came out of my hiding place.

Wisdom is knowing when you have enough.

Enlightenment arrives like a thief in the middle of the dark night of the soul.

... murder wol out

Possibility, or what we refer to as imagination, is 99% imitation. The real deal is only 1%. The problem is, this 1% is simultaneously referred to as Evil.

You stumble upon an unhappy Martian sentry on a mission and shoot ineffectually at his powersuit a few times before he pulps you with his laserbeam eyes and hideous poisonous-gas breath. Glory!

I can't let my mother's death have been in vain. Democracy is the best revenge, and we will have it.

I don't feel under-taxed in any way at all.

The first socialists were the intellectuals; they, and not the masses, are the backbone of Socialism.

I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn.

I heard one presidential candidate say that what this country needed was a president for the nineties. I was set to run again. I thought he said a president IN his nineties.