Gao Xingjian Quotes

I say it's easier to write for other people than write for myself.

As far as writing, it's grown because I've really grown comfortable with who I am.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

Writing is an antidote for loneliness.

I began working quite young, writing, growing, maturing, always striving to top myself - to make people laugh hard at things they know and believe deep in their hearts to be true.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

I was always writing. I've always been attracted to words and stories, communication.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

I actually started writing it because I was inspired by my own personal growth.

I think I'm attracted to writers who tell us something about ourselves.

Anyone who has problems, or worries, anyone who laughs and cries, anyone who feels can write. It's only talking on paper... talking about the things that matter to us.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

Writing is my primary way of expressing myself.

What does music mean to me? I don't think I would really be much without it, without it coming through me. It's my means of communication, my means of growth, my means of transportation from one point in my life to another.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.