Iris Chang

When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute.

Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.

The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.

For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.

Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it's hard to find out when one slides into another.

Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances.