I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing."

…It’s hard to appreciate the beauty of a world when one doubts its very validity….But I’ve long since lost all such doubts, Ono,’ he continued. ‘When I am an old man, when I look back over my life and see I have devoted it to the task of capturing the unique beauty of that world, I believe I will be well satisfied. And no man will make me believe I’ve wasted my time.

I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?

She might be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone.

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

And what made these heart-to-hearts possible--you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time--was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with careful respect: that we'd honor confidences, and that no matter how much we rowed, we wouldn't use against each other anything we'd talked about during those sessions.

Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.