Mu Xin quotes:

Impressions are like pearls; ideas are like the string that turns the pearls into a necklace. The string is invisible, but it is not dispensable and cannot be broken.

Thomas Hardy once advised us to record impressions more and to express ideas less. Now and then I would remember this advice.

Did you ever find that there is room between the two opposing rules of a paradox? That space between two almost opposite rules is the ground where I play and write.

I feel that it would be tedious for a person to have only one life. It would be much better to have two or three lives going on simultaneously...

Ideas' can be only in the distant background of a work of art, something like a very low horizon. In the middle distance and foreground... there shouldn't be any 'ideas' visible.

If you ask me why I left China, it's just that I went for a stroll and strolled too far away.

Prose is like a window; fiction is like a door. But it is not uncommon that he who should come in through the door jumps in through the window.

Whoever first thought of imposing a library fine was indeed intelligent.

By day I was a slave; by night, I was a prince.

The first principle of modern cultures may be their connectedness. Culture is like wind and wind knows no boundary or center. Once there is a center, wind becomes a whirlwind.

What is art in the final analysis? Art is the shining forth of one's interiority