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I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.

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
Would
Suffocate
Profound
Novel
Write
Writing

More quotes by Gao Xingjian

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Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.
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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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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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Body odour (known also as scent of the immortals) is a disgusting condition with an awful, nauseating smell.
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Soul Mountain, the story of one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom.
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Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.
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Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience.
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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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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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Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.
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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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Maybe there isn't a God after all, maybe there's only a universe rotating by itself like a millstone.
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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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I believe in science but I also believe in fate.
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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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If you want to do anything, do it now, without compromise or concession, because you have only one life.
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.
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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.
Gao Xingjian
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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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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