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Maybe there isn't a God after all, maybe there's only a universe rotating by itself like a millstone.

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
Millstone
Rotating
God
Maybe
Universe
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More quotes by Gao Xingjian

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Soul Mountain, the story of one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom.
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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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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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When God talks to humans he doesn't want humans to hear his voice.
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Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.
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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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Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.
Gao Xingjian
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Walk where your heart leads you, there are no restrictions and no burdens.
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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.
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.
Gao Xingjian
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Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.
Gao Xingjian
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There are numerous layers to truth, and the simple and superficial statement of facts cannot satisfy the writer.
Gao Xingjian
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Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience.
Gao Xingjian
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I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.
Gao Xingjian
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When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
Gao Xingjian
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Body odour (known also as scent of the immortals) is a disgusting condition with an awful, nauseating smell.
Gao Xingjian
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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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It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.
Gao Xingjian
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Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.
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.
Gao Xingjian