Gao Xingjian Quotations

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

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

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

Experience has taught me that any kind of political grouping is oppressive. It's the blind mass that crushes the individual.

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.

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

When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.

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

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?

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

In the grand tradition, both Chinese and Western painting have a close link with literature,

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The sand murmurs that it wants to swallow everything.

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

Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.

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.

Indeed, loft aspirations produce ideas.

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

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

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

A good man never fights with a woman.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I believe in science but I also believe in fate.

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

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.

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.

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.

Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.