Top 49 Gao Xingjian Quotes
#1. Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.
Gao Xingjian
#2. Soul Mountain, the story of one man's quest for inner peace and freedom.
Gao Xingjian
#3. Men always look differently at women, even if it's not your intention it is wrongly interpreted as such.
Gao Xingjian
#4. I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.
Gao Xingjian
#5. Truth refuses to be subservient to either politics or the market.
Gao Xingjian
#6. You've lived in the city for a long time and need to feel that you have a hometown.
Gao Xingjian
#7. 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
#8. I decided that I did not want to follow any of these ideologies or trends, because these also exerted a kind of pressure, and obstructed absolute creative freedom.
Gao Xingjian
#9. As a male writer, women are always what men pursue, and their world is always a mystery. So I always tried to present as many views as possible on women's worlds.
Gao Xingjian
#10. I believe in science but I also believe in fate.
Gao Xingjian
#11. 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
#12. There are numerous layers to truth, and the simple and superficial statement of facts cannot satisfy the writer.
Gao Xingjian
#13. Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.
Gao Xingjian
#14. Once the buttons are undone, you know how it'll all end. It's all in the game, there are no miracles.
Gao Xingjian
#15. When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
Gao Xingjian
#16. Maybe there isn't a God after all, maybe there's only a universe rotating by itself like a millstone.
Gao Xingjian
#17. Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.
Gao Xingjian
#18. 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
#19. You're safe only when you can't see anybody.
Gao Xingjian
#20. 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
#21. Love is so holy, so confusing. It makes a man anxious, tormented. Love, how can I define it?
Gao Xingjian
#22. A good work can be communicated across languages ... [provided one does not] fall into the trap of narrow-minded nationalistic or chauvinistic thinking.
Gao Xingjian
#23. Some distance away is a white azalea bush which stuns me with its stately beauty. This is pristine natural beauty. it is irrepressible, seeks no reward, and is without goal, a beauty derived neither from symbolism nor metaphor and needing neither analogies nor associations.
Gao Xingjian
#24. The sand murmurs that it wants to swallow everything.
Gao Xingjian
#26. 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
#27. If, while observing the boundless universe, the writer is able to scrutinise his own self as well as others, the resulting incisiveness of his observations will far surpass objective descriptions of reality.
Gao Xingjian
#28. When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.
Gao Xingjian
#29. Reality exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience. However, once related, even personal experience becomes a narrative.
Gao Xingjian
#30. Walk where your heart leads you, there are no restrictions and no burdens.
Gao Xingjian
#31. 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
#32. Although as an individual Gao had readily denounced the Chinese authorities for the events of 4 June in the French and Italian media, he refused to compromise his integrity as a writer. His stance angered both political sides.
Gao Xingjian
#33. Everyone has to have either this or that problem, if he can't find any problem, he loses all reason for living.
Gao Xingjian
#34. You contemplate and you wander without any worries, between heaven and earth, in your own private world, and in this way you acquire supreme freedom.
Gao Xingjian
#35. With the beginning of life, comes the thirst for truth, whereas the ability to lie is gradually acquired in the process of trying to stay alive.
Gao Xingjian
#36. 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
#37. Life is probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together.
Gao Xingjian
#38. Dreams are more real than reality itself, they're closer to the self.
Gao Xingjian
#39. When God talks to humans he doesn't want humans to hear his voice.
Gao Xingjian
#40. Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can't be related to another person.
Gao Xingjian
#41. Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.
Gao Xingjian
#42. Reading this chapter is optional but as you've read it you've read it.
Gao Xingjian
#43. he was as if a "reborn" human being, a "fundamentalist" as a human being.
Gao Xingjian
#44. Prior to that I had written many works but I was unable to present them for publication, in fact I had burned them all.
Gao Xingjian
#45. I don't want to be a strong hero who can save society. I just want to save myself.
Gao Xingjian
#46. What is essential is whether it is perceived and not whether it exists. To exist and yet not to be perceived is the same as not exist.
Gao Xingjian
#47. Experience has taught me that any kind of political grouping is oppressive. It's the blind mass that crushes the individual.
Gao Xingjian
#48. If everyone is a hero, then disasters and atrocities lose their meaning. It's only when certain people are heroes and others are not that these tragedies and disasters that mankind faces take on meaning.
Gao Xingjian
#49. 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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