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Life is probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together.

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
Together
Love
Life
Knotted
Tangle
Permanently
Probably
Hate

More quotes by 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 don't want to be a strong hero who can save society. I just want to save myself.
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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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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Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.
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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I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.
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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Body odour (known also as scent of the immortals) is a disgusting condition with an awful, nauseating smell.
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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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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Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience.
Gao Xingjian
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Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.
Gao Xingjian
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When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
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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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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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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Soul Mountain, the story of one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom.
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 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