I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once.

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.

The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.

What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow.

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.