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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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Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.
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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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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Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.
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.
Gao Xingjian
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When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
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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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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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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I believe in science but I also believe in fate.
Gao Xingjian
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Walk where your heart leads you, there are no restrictions and no burdens.
Gao Xingjian
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Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.
Gao Xingjian
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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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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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There are numerous layers to truth, and the simple and superficial statement of facts cannot satisfy the writer.
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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I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.
Gao Xingjian
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When God talks to humans he doesn't want humans to hear his voice.
Gao Xingjian
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Men always look differently at women, even if it's not your intention it is wrongly interpreted as such.
Gao Xingjian