From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan's prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large.

The writer's job is the job of a clown …the clown who also talks about sorrow.

The ideal teacher student relationship exists when the student is better than the teacher.

As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century.

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.

If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind.

I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.