Whoa!" he says with a smile. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepen. "Chicken salad a la George Orwell!

When it's raining like this," said Naoko, "it feels as if we're the only ones in the world. I wish it would just keep raining so the three of us could stay together.

In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.

I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.

You're afraid of imagination and even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the resposibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination but you can't supress dreams.