The people of China forged their own literature apart from letters. And today this is what lives, to be part of what is to come, and all the formal literature, which was called art, is dead. The plots of these novels are often incomplete, the love interest is often not brought to solution, heroines are often not beautiful and heroes often are not brave. Nor has the story always an end; sometimes it merely stops, in the way life does, in the middle of it when death is not expected. In this tradition of the novel have I been born and reared as a writer.

Out of this folk mind, turned into stories and crowded with thousands of years of life, grew, literally, the Chinese novel. For these novels changed as they gr…

The instinct which creates the arts is not the same as that which produces art. The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an e…

These Chinese novels are not perfect according to Western standards. They are not always planned from beginning to end, nor are they compact, any more than lif…

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.

I keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is.

I recommended that we establish contact with [the Chinese communists]. We had established contact through a military mission there but that we did not ... we s…