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Gao Xingjian Quotes:

Gao Xingjian quotes

Ocupation: Novelist

Life: b. January 4, 1940

Birthday: January 4

famous quotes

Dreams are more real than reality itself, they're closer to the self.

Topics: Dream, Real, Reality, Lucid Dreaming

quote dreams are more real than reality itself they re closer to the self gao xingjian Quotes

Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.

Topics: Yield, Literature, Starting, Starting Point, Observing

Writing eases my suffering . . . writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.

Topics: Writing, Suffering, Ease

If you want to do anything, do it now, without compromise or concession, because you have only one life.

source: - "Living without 'isms'" by Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. August 1, 2008.

Topics: Want, Compromise

Walk where your heart leads you, there are no restrictions and no burdens.

Topics: Heart, Burden, Restriction

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?

Topics: Writing, Self, Literature, Self Affirmation

Love is so holy, so confusing. It makes a man anxious, tormented. Love, how can I define it?

Topics: Love Is, Men, Confusing

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.

Topics: Writing, People, Atmosphere

Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.

Topics: Literature

If literature is to transcend political interference and return to being a testimony of man and his existential predicament, it needs first to break away from ideology. To be without "isms," is to return to the individual and to return to viewing the world through the eyes of the writer, an individual who relies on his own perceptions and does not act as a spokesman for the people. The people already have rulers and election campaigners speaking in their name.

Topics: Eye, Men, Names

Literary revolution and revolutionary literature did not create a beautiful new world but instead divested literature of its basic nature, promoted violence, and, by resorting to linguistic violence, made a battlefield of this domain of spiritual freedom.

Topics: Beautiful, Spiritual, Revolution, Spiritual Freedom

Once the buttons are undone, you know how it'll all end. It's all in the game, there are no miracles.

Topics: Games, Miracle, Buttons

When I came overseas, I realized that there are many ideologies and many trends, and it's also very hard to produce honest art and honest literature. I decided that I didn't want to follow any of these ideologies or trends, because that's also a kind of pressure that doesn't allow absolute freedom. So I decided that I was only going to produce works that were satisfactory to me, and that meant not following any trends and being anti-ideological.

Topics: Art, Literature, Trends

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.

Topics: Views, Nausea, Literature

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.

Topics: Book, Reading, Differences

There are numerous layers to truth, and the simple and superficial statement of facts cannot satisfy the writer.

Topics: Simple, Layers, Facts

Since it was announced that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has condemned my works and criticized them harshly. All of my works are now banned from getting into China or being published in China. What author would want to return to a country that banned his or her books?

Topics: Country, Book, Chinese

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

Topics: Writing, Profound, Want

A good work can be communicated across languages ... [provided one does not] fall into the trap of narrow-minded nationalistic or chauvinistic thinking.

Topics: Fall, Thinking, Doe, Nationalistic

You're safe only when you can't see anybody.

Topics: Safe

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.

Topics: Creative, Trends, Want, Creative Freedom

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.

Topics: Literature, Moral, Ethical, Busybodies, Volition

When God talks to humans he doesn't want humans to hear his voice.

Topics: Voice, Want, Humans

Language is inherently not concerned with logic. As an expression of the psychological activities of humankind, it simply follows a linear process as it seeks actualisation. Moreover, it does not obey the objective concepts of time and space that belong to the physical world. When the discussion of time and space is imported into linguistic art from scientific aims and research methods, that linguistic art is entirely reduced to trifling pseudo-philosophical issues.

Topics: Art, Philosophical, Issues

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.

Topics: Way, Language, Cliche

I don't want to be a strong hero who can save society. I just want to save myself.

source: - "Living without 'isms'". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. August 1, 2008.

Topics: Strong, Hero, Want

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

source: - "Living without 'isms'". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. August 1, 2008.

Topics: True Life, Fiction, Literature

Young man, nature is not frightening, it's people who are frightening! You just need to get to know nature and it will become friendly. This creature known as man is of course highly intelligent, he's capable of manufacturing almost anything from rumours to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species every day. This is the absurdity of man.

Topics: Baby, Intelligent, Men, Highly Intelligent

Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can't be related to another person.

Topics: Reality, Perception, Instant

I believe in science but I also believe in fate.

Topics: Believe, Fate, I Believe

Men always look differently at women, even if it's not your intention it is wrongly interpreted as such.

Topics: Men, Looks, Intention

Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.

Topics: Art, Thinking, Art Is

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.

Topics: Memories, Trying, Filters, Hazy, Dregs

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.

Topics: Lying, Trying, Alive, Beginning Of Life

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.

Topics: Women, Views, Males

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.

Topics: Lying, Writing, Quality

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.

Topics: Hero, People, Tragedy

Everyone has to have either this or that problem, if he can't find any problem, he loses all reason for living.

Topics: Adversity, Problem, Reason

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.

Topics: Listening, Needs, Language, Affirming

In the century that has just passed, many of the intellectual elite went mad. It was as if, with the death of God, everyone suddenly turned into a saviour who wanted either to annihilate the obsolete world order or to establish a utopia. Naturally, there were writers among those who went mad. The fact that they had knowledge did not exempt intellectuals: there is madness everywhere. When one loses control over one's self, the result is madness.

Topics: Self, Order, Mad

The sand murmurs that it wants to swallow everything.

Topics: Want, Sand

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.

Topics: Eye, Snow, Green

A good man never fights with a woman.

Topics: Fighting, Men, Good Man

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.

source: - "Soul Mountain". Book by Gao Xingjian, 1989.

Topics: Distance, Azaleas, Symbolism, Irrepressible, Pristine

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

source: - Gao Xingjian (2000). “Soul Mountain”

Topics: Hate, Love And Hate, Together

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.

source: - "Soul Mountain". Book by Gao Xingjian, 1990.

Topics: Essentials

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

Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.

source: - "Soul Mountain". Book by Gao Xingjian, 1990.

Topics: Struggle, Life Is, Life Is Fragile

Body odour (known also as scent of the immortals) is a disgusting condition with an awful, nauseating smell.

Topics: Smell, Body, Scent

They say it only takes an instant to have a dream; a dream can be compressed into hardtack.

Topics: Dream, Instant

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.

Topics: Worry, Heaven, World

Truth refuses to be subservient to either politics or the market.

Topics: Truth, Refuse

Maybe there isn't a God after all, maybe there's only a universe rotating by itself like a millstone.

Topics: God, Universe, Rotating

When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.

Topics: Giving, Details, Stories

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.

Topics: Book, Writing, Men

The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.

Topics: War, Moving, Europe, Medieval Europe, Twentieth Century

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.

Topics: Writing, Reality, Self

Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.

Topics: Writing, Poetry, Making Love, Love Poetry

Loneliness is a prerequisite for freedom. Freedom depends on the ability to reflect, and reflection can only begin when one is alone.

Topics: Loneliness, Reflection, Ability, Prerequisites

Indeed, loft aspirations produce ideas.

Topics: Ideas, Produce, Aspiration

Soul Mountain, the story of one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom.

source: - Gao Xingjian (2000). “Soul Mountain”

Topics: Men, Soul, Inner Peace

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