Gao Xingjian Quotes

I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBois’s learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels.

God, the bitter misery that reading works into this world! Everybody knows that - everbody who IS everybody. All the best minds have been off reading for years. Look at the swing La Rouchefoucauld took at it. He said that if nobody had ever learned to read, very few people would be in love. Good for you, La Rouchefoucauld; nice going, boy. I wish I’d never learned to read.

There were people whom I considered friends or loved ones who either abandoned me or betrayed me in ways I'd never have suspected. But there were others who had been barely acquaintances of mine whose loyalty and efforts on my behalf made me realize that not everyone was as inherently rotten as I'd previously believed. So it caused a violent split in my view of humanity - people turned out to be far worse and far better than I'd ever dreamed possible.

...the moron who thought love was forever.

I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world, and I didn't want to sully myself with their weakness anymore.

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

He didn't like very many people any more, or very many things either. He preferred not to be this way, but there it was, he was like that. His cynicism, a veteran's cynicism, was a thing that disturbed him all the time.

I tell people view the federal government as a source of entertainment. It's a lot easier.

Someone once said a cynic is just a disappointed romantic. That really, really sums me up.

I started a short story but it was so dreary that even my pen threw up.

I'm tired of being a nice guy, I've been poor all my life, but don't know quite why.

All the contact I have had with politics has left me feeling as though I had been drinking out of spitoons.

It was all a lie, it all stank, stank of lies, it all gave the illusion of meaning and happiness and beauty, and all of it was just putrefaction that no one would admit to. Bitter was the taste of the world. Life was a torment.

There is a time in our lives, usually in mid-life, when a woman has to make a decision - possibly the most important psychic decision of her future life - and that is, whether to be bitter or not. Women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. They are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they've "had it" and "the last straw has broken the camel's back" and they're "pissed off and pooped out." Their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple. There may be broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises.

Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

I'll think about something else. I'll just sit quietly. If I could sit still. If I could sit still, maybe I could read. Oh, all the books are about people who love each other, truly and sweetly. What do they want to write about that for? Don't they know it isn't true? Don't they know it's a lie, it's a God-damned lie? What do they have to tell about that for, when they know how it hurts?

If they were real, then maybe the world was big enough to have magic in it. And if there was magic — even bad magic, and Zach knew it was more likely that there was bad magic than any good kind — then maybe not everyone had to have a story like his father's, a story like the kind all the adults he knew told, one about giving up and growing bitter.

Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.

Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.

If the generous ideas of youth are too often over- clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false

The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.

Sometimes one learns too early, as I did, what the world is capable of.