When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.

Jo Riley in An Oxford Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama 1997 ISBN 0-19-586880-3
Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian film/images/poetry ed. Many Chinese writers[who?] comment that Gao's "Chinoiserie" or translatable works have opened a new approach for Chinese modern literature to the Swedish Academy and that his winning the Nobel Prize in its 100th anniversary year is a happy occasion for Chinese literature. In 1977 Gao worked for the Committee of Foreign Relationship Chinese Association of Writers.

His prose works tend to be less celebrated in China but are highly regarded elsewhere in Europe and the West. Gao's drama is considered to be fundamentally absurdist in nature and avant-garde in his native China. Gao Xingjian (Chinese: 高行健; Mandarin: [káu ɕĭŋ tɕiɛ̂n]; born January 4 1940) is a Chinese émigré novelist playwright and critic who in 2000 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for an oeuvre of universal validity bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity.