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Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.

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
Starting
Literature
Clear
Yields
Point
Observing
Humans
Minded
Yield
Observation
Oneself

More quotes by Gao Xingjian

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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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They say it only takes an instant to have a dream a dream can be compressed into hardtack.
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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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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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Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.
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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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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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Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience.
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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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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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I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.
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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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Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.
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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Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.
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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Soul Mountain, the story of one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom.
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.
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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