Home > Work > Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh
1 " The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer. "
― Mo Yan , Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh
2 " The cliche that sea dry up and rocks rot away, but the heart never changes is nothing but a beautiful fantasy. "
3 " A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him. "
4 " There are people who walk mules and people walk horses, but I never thought there were people who walk cops. "
5 " My grandmother once told me that while there is no suffering a person cannot endure, there is plenty of good fortune one can never hope to enjoy. I believe that. "
6 " As a child who grew up in a grassy field, enjoying little formal education, I know virtually nothing about literary theories and have had to rely solely upon my own experiences and intuitive understanding of the world to write. "
7 " But what sets me apart from other Chinese writers is that I neither copy the narrative techniques of foreign writers nor imitate their story lines; what I am happy to do is closely explore what is embedded in their work in order to understand their observations of life and comprehend how they view the world we live in. In my mind, by reading the works of others, a writer is actually engaging in a dialogue, maybe even a romance in which, if there is a meeting of the minds, a lifelong friendship is born; if not, an amicable parting is fine, too. "
8 " Glory, causes, careers, and love mean nothing on an empty stomach. Because of food, I lost my self-respect; because of food, I suffered the humiliation of a lowly cur; and because of food I took up creative writing, with a vengeance. "
9 " A writer's place in a nation's literary history cannot be judged by whether or not he is capable of writing a book as heavy as a brick. That must rest on his contributions to the development and enrichment of that nation's language. "
10 " I have nothing but admiration for myself as a youngster; I was a force to be reckoned with then, a much finer specimen than I am now. As kids, we had little meat on our bones; we were sticklike figures with big rounded bellies, the skin stretched so taut it was nearly transparent — you could just about see our intestines twist and coil on the other side. Our necks were so long and thin it was a miracle they could support our heavy heads. "
11 " If an earthworm in the ground won't starve to death, then neither will we, the working class.” He "
12 " During breaks out in the field, when our grumbling stomachs sent a sour taste up into our mouths, our greatest entertainment was talking among ourselves about food. We, along with some of the other field hands, would trade descriptions of delicious foods we had eaten or heard about. It was truly food for the soul. The speakers would invariably have us all drooling. "
