29 quotes
The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe.
I cannot talk about myself otherwise than by saying "Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself".
Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
I don’t think young people need to see the face of the deceased.
Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)
The ideal teacher student relationship exists when the student is better than the teacher.
Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)
To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima’s victims.
Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth.
Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.
The vagueness of the title leaves room for various interpretations of its implications.
Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
The fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.
Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.
A Personal Matter (1964)
The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.
A Personal Matter (1964)
It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.
A Personal Matter (1964)
The writer’s job is the job of a clown …the clown who also talks about sorrow.
Paris Review interview (2007)
To be upright and to have an imagination: that is enough to be a very good young man.
Conversations with History interview (1999)
It's a little bit like what Akari said to his grandmother in Shikoku, during her final illness: 'Please cheer up and die!
A Personal Matter (1964)
If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind.
A Personal Matter (1964)
After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.
Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
There could be joy in destruction, too, couldn’t there? Isn’t Jesus Christ’s Second Coming supposed to occur only after a lot of unmitigated destruction? But again, human history is fraught with tragedies in which man spared no effort to destroy with millenarian joy, only to learn that no messiah appeared afterwards.
Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)
Herein I find the grounds for believing in the exquisite healing power of art.
This belief of mine has not been fully proved.
Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
In principle, I am an anarchist. Kurt Vonnegut once said he was an agnostic who respects Jesus Christ. I am an anarchist who loves democracy.
Paris Review interview (2007)