Famous quotes by Famous people

” By 1979, Chinese people were poorer, on average, than North Koreans. I mean, your average per-capita income in China that year was one third of sub-Saharan Africa’s. “

” There’s a deep underlying unpredictability to life that is thrilling. In China, my wife would say you go out to buy toilet paper, and you come back, and something interesting or revealing or funny happened on the way. “

” I can tell you, going out to buy toilet paper in the U.S. is a completely predictable experience. “

” Usually when you interview somebody for a number of hours, they’ll say something that is self-aggrandizing or is a manipulation of the facts. “

” It’s worth being clear – you know, I think that the ideas that somebody like Richard Spencer endorses and that other members of the self-identified white nationalist groups endorse – those ideas really are repellent to most people. “

” Immigration, of course, in New Hampshire is – it’s not something that you see every day. It’s not like talking about it in Texas, where people have a much more explicit sense of it. “

” If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian. “

” If you’re going to have a book published in China, that means that you’re going to be subject to in-house censorship at the publisher, and then also, of course, the government has an apparatus that is in charge of making sure that ideas that are considered disruptive or overly critical, that those don’t get onto bookstore shelves. “

” When I lived in Beijing in 1996, it was a horizontal city. If you wanted to go out for a burger, if you wanted to really treat yourself, you went to this place called the Jianguo Hotel. The architect had proudly described it as a perfect replica of a Holiday Inn that he had seen in Palo Alto, California. “

” The problem is that in order to publish a book in mainland China, you have to agree to be subject to censorship. That’s the nature of the system. I don’t challenge that system on its face. It’s their system. But as an author, I have a choice to make whether I’ll participate or I won’t. “

” If you’re trying to write about what the Chinese people are talking about, you can sometimes get a distorted picture if you go online and look at the conversation on social media. “