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Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience.

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
Exists
Personal
Experience
Must

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.
Gao Xingjian
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Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.
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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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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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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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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Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.
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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Body odour (known also as scent of the immortals) is a disgusting condition with an awful, nauseating smell.
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
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They say it only takes an instant to have a dream a dream can be compressed into hardtack.
Gao Xingjian
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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?
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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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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When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
Gao Xingjian
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Life is probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together.
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
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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.
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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Soul Mountain, the story of one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom.
Gao Xingjian