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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
Cannot
Satisfy
Truth
Superficial
Layers
Statement
Statements
Writer
Simple
Facts
Numerous

More quotes by Gao Xingjian

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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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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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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.
Gao Xingjian
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I believe in science but I also believe in fate.
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When God talks to humans he doesn't want humans to hear his voice.
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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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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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Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can't be related to another person.
Gao Xingjian
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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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Walk where your heart leads you, there are no restrictions and no burdens.
Gao Xingjian
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Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.
Gao Xingjian
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Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.
Gao Xingjian
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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.
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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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.
Gao Xingjian
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I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.
Gao Xingjian