To be upright and to have an imagination: that is enough to be a very good young man.

To talk of prayer after admitting he professed no faith was, in my opinion, a breach of common courtesy. In this sense, he did make a social blunder, for which I think he well deserved some minor castigation.

It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.

After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.

However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.

The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.

After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped.