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

I think, we can only write very personal matters through our experience. When I named my first novel about my son "A Personal Matter," I believe I knew the most important thing: there is not any personal matter; we must find the link between ourselves, our "personal matter," and society.

There could be joy in destruction, too, couldn't there? Isn't Jesus Christ's Second Coming supposed to occur only after a lot of unmitigated destruction? But again, human history is fraught with tragedies in which man spared no effort to destroy with millenarian joy, only to learn that no messiah appeared afterwards.

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

Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries.

The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic.

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