Top 78 Quotes & Sayings by Gao Xingjian

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Freedom is the basic prerequisite for writing.

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.

Since childhood, I'd dreamed of making a film, but producers in France and Germany wanted to make commercial films with chinoiserie. I refused.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Literature is higher than politics, if not actually above politics.

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

A writer has to fully defend his rights and his own worth.

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

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.

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

When fashion sweeps in, artists follow suit. I think this is the malady of contemporary art.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I believe in science but I also believe in fate.

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.

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.

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

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

Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 contemplate and you wander without any worries, between heaven and earth, in your own private world, and in this way you acquire supreme freedom.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Indeed, loft aspirations produce ideas.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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.