"When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence"
About this Quote
Words aren’t just tools here; they’re oxygen. Gao Xingjian frames language as a survival technology, a way to keep consciousness from going stale under pressure. “Keep your mind alive” suggests a threat that isn’t purely personal depression but the larger deadening forces that hover over anyone who has lived through ideological campaigns, censorship, and the demand to speak in approved slogans. If power tries to colonize your inner life, then the most intimate act of resistance is simply thinking in sentences that belong to you.
The second line turns that resistance inward: “Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.” It’s not a romantic claim about art making you immortal; it’s closer to an existential roll call. Writing becomes proof-of-life, a receipt that the self is still present, still capable of shaping experience rather than being shaped into compliance. The choice of “reaffirming” is telling: existence is not assumed, it’s something that can be eroded, doubted, or stripped of legitimacy, especially for an exile or a citizen whose narrative has been overwritten by the state.
Gao’s subtext is that identity is fragile when language is policed. If public speech can be confiscated, private writing becomes a last jurisdiction. In that context, the line reads less like a writer’s aphorism and more like a strategy: keep producing words, and you keep producing a self that can’t be fully nationalized, revised, or erased.
The second line turns that resistance inward: “Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.” It’s not a romantic claim about art making you immortal; it’s closer to an existential roll call. Writing becomes proof-of-life, a receipt that the self is still present, still capable of shaping experience rather than being shaped into compliance. The choice of “reaffirming” is telling: existence is not assumed, it’s something that can be eroded, doubted, or stripped of legitimacy, especially for an exile or a citizen whose narrative has been overwritten by the state.
Gao’s subtext is that identity is fragile when language is policed. If public speech can be confiscated, private writing becomes a last jurisdiction. In that context, the line reads less like a writer’s aphorism and more like a strategy: keep producing words, and you keep producing a self that can’t be fully nationalized, revised, or erased.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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