But I found that the longer you teach, the more you feel like a total stranger to yourself

The world in books seemed so much more alive to me than anything outside. I could see things I'd never seen before. Books and music were my best friends. I had a couple of good friends at school, but never met anyone I could really speak my heart to.

When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

My heroes don't have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don't know how, so they talk to themselves.

In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.

A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person

In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount.