Everything burns if the flame is hot enough. The world is nothing but a crucible.

The urge is always with me to retouch yesterday's canvas with today's paintbrush and cover the things that fill me with regret.

Heaven is an idea constructed by man to help him cope with the fact that life on earth is both brutally short and, paradoxically, far too long.

All history is just one man trying to take something away from another man, and usually it doesn't really belong to either of them.

Coincidentally, a good age for a Japanese girl is younger than twenty five, because that's when she turns into a 'Christmas Cake'. Christmas cakes, as everyone knows, are desirable before the twenty fifth but afterward quickly become stale and are put on the shelf.

I am not a hero in soul and never will be, but I am better than I was before. Or so I tell myself; and for now that is enough.

That which is painful sharpens one's love.