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

Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.

I think I am doing my works to link myself, my family, with society — with the cosmos. To link me with my family to the cosmos, that is easy, because all literature has some mystic tendency. So when we write about our family, we can link ourselves to the cosmos.

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

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

My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.

I don't think young people need to see the face of the deceased.