Gao Xingjian Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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