Gao Xingjian
It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.Collection: Truth
When fashion sweeps in, artists follow suit. I think this is the malady of contemporary art.
If you want to do anything, do it now, without compromise or concession, because you have only one life.
When I completed writing 'Soul Mountain,' I more or less closed the accounts with China for myself. I was 50 years old when I left, so China is already within me.
Since childhood, I'd dreamed of making a film, but producers in France and Germany wanted to make commercial films with chinoiserie. I refused.
Love is so holy, so confusing. It makes a man anxious, tormented. Love, how can I define it?
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.
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.
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?
I don't want to be a strong hero who can save society. I just want to save myself.
Experience has taught me that any kind of political grouping is oppressive. It's the blind mass that crushes the individual.
Literature is higher than politics, if not actually above politics.
I was born Chinese, and I write in Chinese. I don't think there's any need to evade this... to a writer, as to a person, what matters is not his political label or his nationality, but whether he is a person and whether his work is worth looking at.
A writer has to fully defend his rights and his own worth.
When I lived in China, my works were already being banned, and I couldn't publish. In those days, when I was in China, I was writing for myself, so that's the process of writing for myself that was the most important thing.
When I first heard that I had won the prize, I thought that it was something for myself, that it was something personal, recognition of my writings. But there is such a strong reaction from Chinese people in particular. It's been very passionate, overwhelming and passionate, Chinese people from all over the world.
The destruction of Chinese traditional culture didn't start in 1949. It started long before that, with the succession of revolutions. It was particularly bad during the Cultural Revolution, the destruction of traditional Chinese culture.
Various political parties, even if they're in direct opposition with one another, still say they are the spokesperson for the people. The writer must speak his own words and not get mixed up with politics.
Freedom is the basic prerequisite for writing.
Literature transcends national boundaries, racial boundaries. It goes deep into the issues that concern all human beings. That is why, when people read Greek tragedy - it doesn't matter who reads it - they are still moved by it.
Literature hasn't come up with any new themes. The literature of all different times - it's still dealing with how one resolves issues of existence.
Many intellectuals feel themselves to be Supermen who are spokesmen for the people. But in my opinion, they're to be pitied. Under Mao's dictatorship, these poor sheep suffered the same fate as everyone else.
If you're not perfectly conscious of yourself, that self can be tyrannical; in relationship to others, anyone can become a tyrant. That's why no one can be a Superman. You have to go beyond yourself with a 'third eye' - self-awareness - because the one thing you cannot flee is yourself.
Dreams are more real than reality itself, they're closer to the self.Collection: Dream
Loneliness is a prerequisite for freedom. Freedom depends on the ability to reflect, and reflection can only begin when one is alone.Collection: Loneliness
Walk where your heart leads you, there are no restrictions and no burdens.Collection: Freedom
Writing eases my suffering . . . writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.Collection: Writing
Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Hero
You're safe only when you can't see anybody.Collection: Safe
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.Collection: Distance
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.Collection: Essentials
Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Worry
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.Collection: Lying
Truth refuses to be subservient to either politics or the market.Collection: Truth
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?Collection: Country
Life is probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together.Collection: Hate
A good work can be communicated across languages ... [provided one does not] fall into the trap of narrow-minded nationalistic or chauvinistic thinking.Collection: Fall
Everyone has to have either this or that problem, if he can't find any problem, he loses all reason for living.Collection: Adversity
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Writing
I believe in science but I also believe in fate.Collection: Believe
Once the buttons are undone, you know how it'll all end. It's all in the game, there are no miracles.Collection: Games
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.Collection: Memories