1.
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.
Mu Xin
2.
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.
Mu Xin
3.
Thomas Hardy once advised us to record impressions more and to express ideas less. Now and then I would remember this advice.
Mu Xin
4.
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.
Mu Xin
5.
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.
Mu Xin
6.
What is art in the final analysis? Art is the shining forth of one's interiority.
Mu Xin
7.
By day I was a slave; by night, I was a prince.
Mu Xin
8.
If you ask me why I left China, it's just that I went for a stroll and strolled too far away.
Mu Xin
9.
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.
Mu Xin
10.
Whoever first thought of imposing a library fine was indeed intelligent.
Mu Xin
11.
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.
Mu Xin