If you miss the bus, miss the train, you’d be left behind. So everyone says, let’s get on the train, let’s get on the bus and go faster and get rich... I just didn’t like that kind of lifestyle. I love to read books, to listen to music.

At least he never walked.

The best point of my novels, I think, is their humor. I want to keep many my works humorous.

You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.

No matter how clear things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution, as there was in math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a problem into another form. Depending on the nature and the direction of the problem, a solution might be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that solution in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. It served no immediate practical purpose, but it contained a possibility.

A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.

If she did experience sex-or something close to it-in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.