Top 50 Gao Xingjian Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Dreams are more real than reality itself, they’re closer to the self.”

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

6. “A good man never fights with a woman.”

— Gao Xingjian

7. “You’re safe only when you can’t see anybody.”

— Gao Xingjian

8. “It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.”

— Gao Xingjian

9. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

10. “Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.”

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

12. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

14. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

15. “Prior to that I had written many works but I was unable to present them for publication, in fact I had burned them all.”

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

17. “I don’t want to be a strong hero who can save society. I just want to save myself.”

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

20. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

21. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

22. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

25. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

26. “The sand murmurs that it wants to swallow everything.”

— Gao Xingjian

27. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

28. “Maybe there isn’t a God after all, maybe there’s only a universe rotating by itself like a millstone.”

— Gao Xingjian

29. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

30. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

31. “I believe in science but I also believe in fate.”

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

34. “Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.”

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

37. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

38. “When God talks to humans he doesn’t want humans to hear his voice.”

— Gao Xingjian

39. “Indeed, loft aspirations produce ideas.”

— Gao Xingjian

40. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

41. “Sitting at rest know not to discuss the shortcomings of other people Setting out on a journey fully appreciate the beauty of the dragon river.”

— Gao Xingjian

42. “I did not think about what sort of people might read it. In fact, I was writing it for myself.”

— Gao Xingjian

43. “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?”

— Gao Xingjian

44. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

46. “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.”

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Gao Xingjian

48. “Another issue was language, the problem of expressing these themes in language and the problem of how much one can articulate in language.”

— Gao Xingjian

49. “Although as an individual Gao had readily denounced the Chinese authorities for the events of 4 June in the French and Italian media, he refused to compromise his integrity as a writer. His stance angered both political sides.”

— Gao Xingjian

50. “When a man gets to middle age shouldn’t he look for a peaceful and stable existence, find a not-too-demanding sort of a job, stay in a mediocre position, become a husband and a father, set up a comfortable home, put money in the bank and add to it every month so there’ll be something for old age and a little left over for the next generation?”

— Gao Xingjian