The writer Guan Moye took the pen name Mo Yan (莫言). Taken literally, he has said, it means “do not speak.” In December 2012, at a press conference in Stockholm, where he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, he explained: “As a child, I often talked carelessly and brought my parents a lot of trouble. So they taught me to speak less.” He chose the name, he said, “mainly to remind myself to speak less and write more.”