The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.

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

It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.

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

Fundamentally a good author has his or her own sense of style. There is a natural, deep voice, and that voice is present from the first draft of a manuscript. When he or she elaborates on the initial manuscript, it continues to strengthen and simplify that natural, deep voice.

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.

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.