Daily Inspiration Quote by Gao Xingjian

There is a confession tucked inside the politeness: the “mystery” isn’t women, it’s the male writer’s habit of treating women as a destination rather than a subject. Gao starts from a bluntly traditional premise - “women are what men pursue” - and then pivots to a corrective that still can’t quite escape the frame. The line does double work: it acknowledges the gravitational pull of the male gaze in literature while trying to domesticate it through craft, as if multiplying perspectives can launder an inherited bias.

“As a male writer” is the key throat-clear. It’s a disclaimer, but also a claim to authority: I know I’m positioned, therefore I’m being responsible. Yet the phrasing “their world” keeps the border intact. Women remain a separate country the novelist visits with a notebook, not fellow citizens with their own passports and languages. “Always” appears twice, turning social conditioning into something like natural law; the attempt at openness is constrained by a worldview presented as inevitable.

Context matters. Gao, shaped by mid-20th-century China and later exile, writes amid systems where speech is policed and identity is negotiated under pressure. “Present as many views as possible” echoes his broader aesthetic of multiplicity and distance: a refusal of single, sanctioned truth. That ambition is real. The subtext, though, is unresolved: even pluralism can be a way to keep control. You can give women many “views” and still be the one holding the camera.