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Quotes from Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself — Kenzaburō Ōe

1935–2023 Japan

← All quotes by Kenzaburō Ōe

9 quotes

I cannot talk about myself otherwise than by saying "Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself".

Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)

Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth.

Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Kenzaburō Ōe (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.