Gao Xingjian
Gao Xingjian
Gao Xingjianis a Chinese émigré novelist, playwright, and critic who in 2000 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity.” He is also a noted translator, screenwriter, stage director, and a celebrated painter. In 1998, Gao was granted French citizenship...
NationalityChinese
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth4 January 1940
CountryChina
writing poetry making-love
Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.
writing reality self
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.
book writing men
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.
writing profound want
I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.
writing people survival
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.
writing self 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?
lying writing quality
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.
writing suffering ease
Writing eases my suffering . . . writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.
mind
When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.
crushes experience grouping mass taught
Experience has taught me that any kind of political grouping is oppressive. It's the blind mass that crushes the individual.
Writing eases my suffering... writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.
both chinese close grand link literature painting western
In the grand tradition, both Chinese and Western painting have a close link with literature,
lying trying alive
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.
eye men names
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.