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If you want to do anything, do it now, without compromise or concession, because you have only one life.

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
Concessions
Compromise
Anything
Without
Life
Concession

More quotes by Gao Xingjian

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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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Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience.
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Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.
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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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When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
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When God talks to humans he doesn't want humans to hear his voice.
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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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Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.
Gao Xingjian
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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.
Gao Xingjian
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Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.
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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?
Gao Xingjian
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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.
Gao Xingjian
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Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can't be related to another person.
Gao Xingjian
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Men always look differently at women, even if it's not your intention it is wrongly interpreted as such.
Gao Xingjian
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Maybe there isn't a God after all, maybe there's only a universe rotating by itself like a millstone.
Gao Xingjian
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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.
Gao Xingjian
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Soul Mountain, the story of one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom.
Gao Xingjian
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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.
Gao Xingjian
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Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.
Gao Xingjian
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I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.
Gao Xingjian