Ma Jian Quotes
I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually.
Quotes to Explore
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I'm very content.
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For me everything in the film was gradually building, becoming more emotional, so it helped. At the end of it all I was emotionally drained. At that point I took Rose's view, that this has to happen, there's nothing I can do about it.
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I find myself so easily discouraged. It is pathetic how easily I can be discouraged - easily discouraged by resistance, easily discouraged by opposition, easily discouraged by hardness of heart, easily discouraged by blindness.
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I can tell you, all the intelligence services in the world were running my name through their databases to see did anyone by this name come in the country? When? Do we know anything about it? Where did she stay? Who did she see?
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There are always reasons for people's behaviour, and it's easy just to dismiss them and assume that we already know their story, especially if they're no good at showing their emotions. Life gives you all these knocks, it's so easy to form a shell to protect yourself. I've done it myself.
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I never really learned photography.
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I was never the pretty girl at school. I'm tiny and mixed-race. I grew up in a white area. I was always the loner.
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Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material.
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My feeling is, I do a lot of low-budget films. I don't do low-budget acting. I have no interest in just goofballing my way through, thinking, 'Ah, no one's ever going to see this anyway.'
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When I'm in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.
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I am an opponent of war and of war preparations and an opponent of universal military training and conscription; but entirely apart from that issue, I hold that segregation in any part of the body politic is an act of slavery and an act of war.
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The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.
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An artist is born like a priest is born. If they are born an artist, I would tell them art is not a game: it is something very serious which completely requires everything you have to give.
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I want to be the defensive player to break the MVP barrier. I want to break barriers. I want to do things when people tell me I can't.
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No one out there is interested in who did what to whom in Westminster politics.
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I have a certain manner of speech that is unique to me. I tried once to have my staff tweet for me, and it was a disaster! People knew right away that it wasn't me.
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Your former Fathers the Spaniards have now no further Authority over you.
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According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad - so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed - that they're actually rather good.
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Having a bad haircut can be quite traumatic!
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I can't give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma.
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We see that, sometimes, as a result of these dislocations, as a result of people leaving their original intended career and going into something else where their creativity could make a difference, that depressions and all kinds of other unfortunate events can have a paradoxically stimulating effect on creativity.
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I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually.
