Quote

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.

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
Persons
Person
Transmission
Human
Affirming
Humans
Meaning
Need
Listening
Needs
Simply
Time
Existence
Language

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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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Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.
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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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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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Maybe there isn't a God after all, maybe there's only a universe rotating by itself like a millstone.
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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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There are numerous layers to truth, and the simple and superficial statement of facts cannot satisfy the writer.
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Walk where your heart leads you, there are no restrictions and no burdens.
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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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Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can't be related to another person.
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Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.
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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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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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I believe in science but I also believe in fate.
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Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.
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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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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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Life is probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together.
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