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Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.

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
Poetry
Everybody
Write
Writing
Make
Love
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More quotes by 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.
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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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Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.
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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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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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If you want to do anything, do it now, without compromise or concession, because you have only one life.
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When God talks to humans he doesn't want humans to hear his voice.
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Soul Mountain, the story of one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom.
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Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience.
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Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.
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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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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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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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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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Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.
Gao Xingjian
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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.
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.
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