I was growing up in a society that exerted a lot of control on people, and from both my personality and the social condition, I found gunpowder gradually as a very suitable medium for exploration.

My father was also a painter - actually, a traditional Chinese painter. His personality is pretty timid and cautious. Like him, I was growing up as a cautious kid.

The role of art in society is not to resolve conflicts; rather, it is to express these conflicts and antagonisms.

Using gunpowder as a medium became a way to liberate myself.

In the 1970s, family history wasn't yet thought of a serious field for study. I was terrified of being laughed at by other historians. I called my book 'The Social Origins of Private Life.' It should have been 'As Pompous as You Want to Be.' Every sentence was academic jargon, and if I said X, I qualified it with Y.

When you meet your kids, you realize that they deserve great parents. And then you have your marching orders, and you have to try and become the person that they deserve.

Who was Amanda Knox? Was she a fresh-faced honor student from Seattle who met anyone's definition of an all-American girl - attractive, athletic, smart, hard-working, adventuresome, in love with languages and travel? Or was her pretty face a mask, a duplicitous cover for a depraved soul?

When I went home at 20 to tell my parents, 'I don't want to be an engineer, I want to try and write books,' I was braced for, 'That's not gonna happen.' But I didn't get that response, and maybe it was because of my dad's experience of having an artistic dream and having to put it aside.