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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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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
Layers
Statement
Statements
Writer
Simple
Numerous
Facts
Satisfy
Cannot
Truth
Superficial

More quotes by Gao Xingjian

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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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If you want to do anything, do it now, without compromise or concession, because you have only one life.
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When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
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Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.
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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 probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together.
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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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When God talks to humans he doesn't want humans to hear his voice.
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Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.
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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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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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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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I believe in science but I also believe in fate.
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Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.
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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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Men always look differently at women, even if it's not your intention it is wrongly interpreted as such.
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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 want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.
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Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.
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Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience.
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