For an artist to do creative work, he needs at once physical health and some physiomental ill health. He needs both serenity and gloom.

It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.

Time is what matters. As time goes by, you and I will be carried inexorably into the mainstream of our period, even though we’re unaware of what it is. And later, when they say that young men in the early Taisho era thought, dressed, talked, in such and such a way, they’ll be talking about you and me. We’ll all be lumped together…. In a few decades, people will see you and the people you despise as one and the same, a single entity.

For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.

However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins. It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it. Nevertheless, despite the enemy's depredations upon my person, I turned their universality - at once a weapon and a weakness - back on them, and to some extent succeeded in using words to universalize to my own individuality.

Again and again, the cicada's untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.

A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.