Author

Being in a Chinese coal mine for 30 years is like an epic novel. It's tragic.

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

There's a deep underlying unpredictability to life that is thrilling. In China, my wife would say you go out to buy toilet paper, and you come back, and something interesting or revealing or funny happened on the way.

From Evan Osnos

I can tell you, going out to buy toilet paper in the U.S. is a completely predictable experience.

From Evan Osnos

There's a tradition in the history of dissent in authoritarian countries of a certain kind of dissident, and their form of dissent is to live their lives as normally as possible.

From Evan Osnos

There's a reason the Chinese government is very concerned about Ai Weiwei. It's because he has all of these ingredients in his life that allow him to attract enormous attention across a very broad spectrum of the population.

From Evan Osnos

On some level, there's a limit to what the government really worries about when it comes to a guy like Ai Weiwei, who's talking to a limited audience of people. He's talking to people who more or less already agree with him.

From Evan Osnos

Usually when you interview somebody for a number of hours, they'll say something that is self-aggrandizing or is a manipulation of the facts.

From Evan Osnos

There's a national ambition, a collective, in a sense, political ambition, which I think is the thing we see from far away. That's the fact that China's building roads and airports and extending its reaches out into the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and in a way that's putting it into some tension with its neighbors.

From Evan Osnos

I spent years overseas. I spent 11 years abroad.

From Evan Osnos

Evan Osnos

Notable Quotes

Authors with Similar Views

Rebecca MacKinnon

Ai Weiwei

Kevin Kwan

Hu Jintao

Hu Shih

Authors with Opposing Views

Jennifer Aniston

Paolo Bacigalupi

Terry Glavin

Alice Koller

Barbara Pym