29 quotes
I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites.
Paris Review interview (2007)
The verb "heal" must be used actively. I heal myself.
Conversations with History interview (1999)
He said he didn’t care if he went to heaven or hell, because neither could be more fearful than absolute nothingness; salvation and damnation were one and the same if the only thing out there was total nothingness.
Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)
I don’t have faith nor do I think I will have it in the future, but I’m not an atheist. My faith is that of a secular person. You might call it “morality.”
Paris Review interview (2007)
The readers can not expect that words will ever come out of these poems and get through to us. One can never understand or feel sympathetic towards these Zen poems except by giving oneself up and willingly penetrating into the closed shells of those words.
Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
A dangerous atmosphere of nationalism is coming in our society. So now I want to criticize this tendency, and I want to do everything to prevent the development of fascism in Japanese society.
Conversations with History interview (1999)
As one with a peripheral, marginal and off-centre existence in the world I would like to seek how — with what I hope is a modest decent and humanist contribution — I can be of some use in a cure and reconciliation of mankind.
Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.
Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
I think the question for him is, how is a faithless person to cope with life. This is where he believes he can find something upon which to establish a literary career. You know, don’t you, how often he talks of Yeats? This goes way back, to when he was very young.
Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)