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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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Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience.
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Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can't be related to another person.
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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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I believe in science but I also believe in fate.
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Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.
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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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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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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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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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They say it only takes an instant to have a dream a dream can be compressed into hardtack.
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When God talks to humans he doesn't want humans to hear his voice.
Gao Xingjian
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Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.
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If you want to do anything, do it now, without compromise or concession, because you have only one life.
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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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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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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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Life is probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together.
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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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I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.
Gao Xingjian