Zhang Dai Quotes

It will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry. This is landmark stuff. I can't overestimate it!

We live in a society where there is no law in making money in the promulgation of ignorance or, in some cases, stupidity. There are a lot of things you can say never happened. You can go as relatively quasi-harmless as saying no one went to the moon. But you also can say that the Holocaust never happened.

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it, but fear I must.

African music, though very old, is always being rediscovered in the West.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.

I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of an ancestral promptings and urgings, a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

Nothing is more important than empathy for another human being’s suffering. Nothing — not a career, not wealth, not intelligence, certainly not status. We have to feel for one another if we’re going to survive with dignity.

I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it's the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It's probably the most important thing in a person.

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.

The Rose Vol. 2 (2005)

If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilized discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up.

Splendid Things
Chinese brocade. A sword with a decorated scabbard. The grain of the wood in a Buddhist statue. Long flowering branches of beautifully coloured wistaria entwined about a pine tree. (p. 109)

It is useless to talk with those who do not understand one and troublesome to talk with those who criticize from a feeling of superiority. Especially one-sided persons are troublesome. Few are accomplished in many arts and most cling narrowly to their own opinion.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

I would like for my books to have been recognized posthumously, at least in capitalist countries, where they turn you into a kind of merchandise.