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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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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
History
Authors
Write
Published
Self
Continued
Many
Achieved
Great
Endure
Lifetimes
Writing
Lifetime
Enduring
Works
Selfless
Literature
Affirmation

More quotes by Gao Xingjian

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I believe in science but I also believe in fate.
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Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.
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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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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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Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.
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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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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.
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Soul Mountain, the story of one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom.
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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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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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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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Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience.
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Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.
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When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
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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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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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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.
Gao Xingjian
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Life is probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together.
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Walk where your heart leads you, there are no restrictions and no burdens.
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