If you're criticized then you can use it as an experience. Compliments, you can't use.

Japanese are very proud and workaholics. Proud workaholics.

You can't always measure the effects of activist work; you just have to wish and pray that the message gets through.

Everybody's an artist. Everybody's God. It's just that they're inhibited. I believe in people so much that if the whole of civilization is burned so we don't have any memory of it, even then people will start to build their own art. It is a necessity -- a function. We don't need history.

If someone is unpleasant to you, draw a halo around his or her head in your mind. He/she is an angel who came to teach you something.

The only instrument I can play is piano. Whenever I make songs at home, I play the piano and make them on the piano.

I trust in my inspiration, really, and that's difficult because sometimes you would rather be technical. And once you empty your mind, empty your brain, it's really incredible. I'm very caring about things that dash into my brain, and I make sure I don't just clog it.