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For me, writing [was] a question of survival...I could not trust anyone, even my family. The atmosphere was so poisoned. People even in your own family could turn you in.
Gao Xingjian
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Gao Xingjian
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 4
Film Director
Literary Critic
Novelist
Painter
Playwright
Translator
Writer
Xingjian Gao
Hành Kiện Cao
Hsing-chien Kao
Turns
Family
Poisoned
Writing
Atmosphere
Even
Survival
People
Trust
Question
Turn
Anyone
More quotes by Gao Xingjian
Once the buttons are undone, you know how it'll all end. It's all in the game, there are no miracles.
Gao Xingjian
If you want to do anything, do it now, without compromise or concession, because you have only one life.
Gao Xingjian
Body odour (known also as scent of the immortals) is a disgusting condition with an awful, nauseating smell.
Gao Xingjian
Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.
Gao Xingjian
I believe in science but I also believe in fate.
Gao Xingjian
When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
Gao Xingjian
Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.
Gao Xingjian
Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.
Gao Xingjian
The enterprise of describing something in language that has never been described before is a very difficult thing to do. When you decide to do away with old cliches or old phraseologies, and to come up with a new way of saying something, it's extremely difficult.
Gao Xingjian
Men always look differently at women, even if it's not your intention it is wrongly interpreted as such.
Gao Xingjian
It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.
Gao Xingjian
When God talks to humans he doesn't want humans to hear his voice.
Gao Xingjian
Everyone has to have either this or that problem, if he can't find any problem, he loses all reason for living.
Gao Xingjian
To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.
Gao Xingjian
Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.
Gao Xingjian
I hadn't originally intended to do any reading, what if I did read one book more or one book less, whether I read or not wouldn't make a difference, I would still be waiting to get cremated.
Gao Xingjian
Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can't be related to another person.
Gao Xingjian
Man tends to think that he is a creator, that he is like God. This is especially true of intellectuals, and in the last century, intellectuals tended to forget that they were like everyone else. Writing this book was a description of man going from a state of God back to a state of man, back to being a normal person.
Gao Xingjian
Maybe there isn't a God after all, maybe there's only a universe rotating by itself like a millstone.
Gao Xingjian
You should know that there is little you can seek in this world, that there is no need for you to be so greedy, in the end all you can achieve are memories, hazy, intangible, dreamlike memories which are impossible to articulate. When you try to relate them, there are only sentences, the dregs left from the filter of linguistic structures.
Gao Xingjian
