Quotes from Ma Jian

I don't know where I am going, I just know I had to leave. Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.

My mind flashed back to the Cultural Revolution, when a group of Red Guards pulled our neighbor, Granny Li, out of the opera company's dormitory block and ordered the rest of us to bring out our thermos flasks. We then had to stand and watch as the Red Guards poured ten flasks of boiling water over Granny Li's head.

I see my skeleton walking down the street now. I'm walking behind it. Our feet touch the ground at the same time. I am my own shadow. The road we're walking along looks familiar. The trees lining the pavement have been bleached by the sun. There are stone steps on my left. I climb them. This is the route I used to take after school. It's very dark. The skeleton has disappeared.

If there is road in front of me, I will follow it. I don't mind where it goes, as long as it takes me forward.

Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead. I want to think on my feet, live on the run.

I paint as the mood takes me- it is an emotional release. But in this society moods and images can incriminate you. Writing is much safer for me. I can hide myself behind a maze of words and the details of people's lives.

But utopias always lead to dystopias, and dictators invariably become gods who demand daily worship.

From now on, every individual, irrespective of rank, must submit their dreams and nightmares to me for examination and approval. If they fail to comply, every dream they have ever had, and every dream they ever will have, will be deemed an illegal dream!

Why is it that men are so good at turning their heaven into a hell?

When man's spirit is in chains, he loses all respect for nature.

Când nu mai avem puterea s? ne lupt?m cu lumea asta s?lbatic?, ne întoarcem în noi È™i începem s? ne facem r?u nou? înÈ™ine...

Ce ciudate mai sunt È™i relaÈ›iile dintre oameni. Ne purt?m frumos, ba chiar exagerat de frumos, cu acei oameni de care ne e team?, în schimb cu cei timizi È™i retraÈ™i ne purt?m ca niÈ™te despoÈ›i. (...) Cu toÈ›ii avem o natur? dubl?.

The Chinese alive today are reincarnations of torturers. The wronged souls of the past will haunt us for ever. We must pay for the sins of our ancestors.

Beijing Coma took me 10 years to finish. The first few years, I wrote very little. A single recurrent image was blocking my progress: a man lying naked on an iron bed, a sparrow perched on his arm, his chest illuminated by a cold beam of light. Those 10 years were a struggle to prove to myself the power and meaning of that single beam of light.

no path is solitary, we all tread across other people's beginnings and ends.

Families destroyed by Mao Zedong hang posters of him on their walls. Because they all know Chinese history changes as frequently as the Yellow River floods its banks.

As you shrink back inside your body, your childhood fears flicker through your mind. All the feelings you've felt in the past have been sheltering inside your flesh.

Tyrannies not only want to control your mind and thoughts but your flesh as well.

The literal meaning of the Chinese characters for revolution is elimination of life

Red Dust was about the late 1980s; it was a time of burgeoning hopes and opening up and people searching for new ways.

To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons.

Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.

If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.

In February of this year I returned to China to research my next book. The authorities know about the novels of mine that have been published in the west, including the latest one, Beijing Coma, about a student shot in Tiananmen Square, but so far have allowed me to return.