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

More quotes by Gao Xingjian

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When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
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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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Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.
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Body odour (known also as scent of the immortals) is a disgusting condition with an awful, nauseating smell.
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Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience.
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Men always look differently at women, even if it's not your intention it is wrongly interpreted as such.
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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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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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When God talks to humans he doesn't want humans to hear his voice.
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In my view the time for rousing revolutionary literature has passed, because the revolution has already revolutionised itself to death and has left behind only bitterness and a sort of weariness, listlessness and even nausea.
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Soul Mountain, the story of one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom.
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They say it only takes an instant to have a dream a dream can be compressed into hardtack.
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In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?
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Life is probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together.
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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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I believe in science but I also believe in fate.
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Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for 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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