“Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.”
Cao Xueqin livre Dream of the Red Chamber
Jia zuo zhen shi zhen yi jia,
Wu wei you chu you huan wu.
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
Cao Xueqin , né à Nankin soit en 1715, soit en 1724 et mort à Pékin soit en 1763, soit en 1764, est un écrivain chinois actif sous le règne de l'empereur Qianlong de la dynastie Qing.
Descendant d'une grande famille déchue, il est l'auteur du grand roman Le Rêve dans le pavillon rouge qu'il laissa inachevé et qui fut publié plusieurs années après sa mort. Wikipedia

“Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.”
Cao Xueqin livre Dream of the Red Chamber
Jia zuo zhen shi zhen yi jia,
Wu wei you chu you huan wu.
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
Cao Xueqin livre Dream of the Red Chamber
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 1
Cao Xueqin livre Dream of the Red Chamber
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
“Fall'n the great house once so secure in wealth,
Each scattered member shifting for himself.”
Cao Xueqin livre Dream of the Red Chamber
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
“All those whom history calls great
Left only empty names for us to venerate.”
Cao Xueqin livre Dream of the Red Chamber
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
Cao Xueqin livre Dream of the Red Chamber
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 2
Cao Xueqin, as quoted in the introduction attributed to his younger brother (Cao Tangcun) to the first chapter of Dream of the Red Chamber, present in the jiaxu (1754) version (the earliest-known manuscript copy of the novel), translated by David Hawkes in The Story of the Stone: The Golden Days (Penguin, 1973), pp. 20–21
“One day, when spring has gone and youth has fled,
The Maiden and the flowers will both be dead.”
Cao Xueqin livre Dream of the Red Chamber
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 27
Cao Xueqin livre Dream of the Red Chamber
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
“Let others laugh flower-burial to see:
Another year who will be burying me?”
Cao Xueqin livre Dream of the Red Chamber
Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760)
“Words on the paper mix with blood,
The extraordinary labor of ten years!”
(zh-TW) 字字看來皆是血,十年辛苦不尋常 。
Red Inkstone, couplet in the preface to Dream of the Red Chamber, 1754 Jiaxu manuscript (甲戌本); quoted in Zhou Ruchang's Between Noble and Humble, trans. Liangmei Bao (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 181.
Couplet in the preface to Dream of the Red Chamber, 1754 Jiaxu manuscript (甲戌本); the couplet is "generally considered to be written by Cao Xueqin" according to Wong Kwok-pun in Dreaming across Languages and Cultures (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), footnote on p. 71, but Zhou Ruchang attributes it to Red Inkstone in Between Noble and Humble, trans. Liangmei Bao (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 181. note: Variant translations: note: Every word [in the novel] which one looks at is a drop of blood. The ten years ' painstaking labour is no commonplace.
Source: From On The Red Chamber Dream by Shichang Wu (Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 24