Ma Jian Quotes

The thing that surprises me most is, you cannot change who you are.

If there's a common thread to my books, it is that each involves an individual's journey. The individual must stay true to themselves.

I'm really interested in stories about identity - who I am now versus who I used to be.

Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

I always say it is not the arrival; it is the journey.

As you move through this life...you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you.

I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is madeand at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.

I've come to believe that whoever I am didn't start on December 14, 1946, and isn't going to end on whatever that mysterious date is in the future.

It's taken me a long time to realize that my own life is far more interesting than any part I'll ever play.

When you go from one place to another, you go with experience, you don't go with prescriptions.

I'm a work in progress.

In the last couple of years I've been facing down a lot of the demons of the past and trying to find out, who I am, It's something I think I'll be doing for the rest of my life.

I think the idea that you know who your inner self is on a daily basis, because... you know. What's good for you 25 years ago may not be good for you now. So, to keep in touch with that, I think that's the first ingredient for success. Because if you're a successful human being, everything else is gravy, I think.

I think that 'Floor Sample' is a story of resiliency, a lifelong spiritual search, and a lifelong sense of spiritual companionship that is most often expressed as creativity. My desire in writing the book was to step from behind the icon of 'Julia the teacher' and introduce 'Julia the artist.'

You grow and you change, or at least you think you do, but you're kind of the same.

It's so much easier to know who you are when there aren't a thousand people telling you who they think you are.

I think we have two very important missions in life. One is to find out who we really are and the other one is to taste as much of life and experience as much of life as we can.

Everybody has their story - at some point you have to say, 'This is who I am: Now it's up to me to become what I want to be.'

But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.

In a sense, 'Out of Oz' is an examination of how individuals keep going, keep reinventing themselves and their lives, even after life-altering complications have afflicted them.

I have seen vast, perhaps unbelievable, changes during the journey that has brought me from the flicker of a lamp in a small Bengal village to the chandeliers of Delhi.

I don't have dreams. How can I say it? I myself am a dream.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

If you can understand the inner life, then you can wear the uniform, the tattoos, or whatnot and realize that the things that are different about us become superficial.

My interest lies in my self-expression - what's inside of me - not what I'm in.