After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped.

My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.

The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.

After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.

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

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.

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

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

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

However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.

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

One lie has the power to tarnish a thousand truths.

I want you. I want you under me and over me and around me. And you want.

Had not enough gone wrong?

Spiritual nature is inconceivable and unlimited. Therefore, the activities of that realm will always remain beyond our mental speculation and intellectual concept.

You can never be comfortable with your success, you've got to be paranoid you're going to lose it.

I'm the type that thinks if you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it.

I've learned that for many people, change is uncomfortable. Maybe they want to go through it, and they can see the benefit of it, but at a gut level, change is uncomfortable.

The proof of spiritual maturity is not how pure you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.

The pleasure of being alive is brought into sharper focus when you need to pay attention to staying alive.