By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.

There's no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written.

The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb.

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

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

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

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.