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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
Turn
Anyone
Turns
Family
Poisoned
Writing
Atmosphere
Even
Survival
People
Trust
Question

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There are numerous layers to truth, and the simple and superficial statement of facts cannot satisfy the writer.
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Life is probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together.
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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.
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It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.
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Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.
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Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.
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Maybe there isn't a God after all, maybe there's only a universe rotating by itself like a millstone.
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When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
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In the snow outside my window I see a small green frog, one eye blinking and the other wide open, unmoving, looking at me. I know this is God.
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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.
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Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.
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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.
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Once the buttons are undone, you know how it'll all end. It's all in the game, there are no miracles.
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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.
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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.
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Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.
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I believe in science but I also believe in fate.
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Everyone has to have either this or that problem, if he can't find any problem, he loses all reason for living.
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I don't want to be a strong hero who can save society. I just want to save myself.
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The human need for language is not simply for the transmission of meaning, it is at the same time listening to and affirming a person's existence.
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