I don't think young people need to see the face of the deceased.

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.

When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.

If you cast your bread upon the water and you have faith, you'll get back cash. If you don't have faith, you'll get soggy bread.

PepsiCo did not have a woman in the senior ranks, nor a foreign-born person who was willing to think differently

Normally, when you go to a beach, everybody is wearing bikinis, but on a film, you're the only one. There's like 60 people staring at you. They're doing their jobs, but they're still staring at you.

Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.

Playing a fashion designer could be the bane of my existence because I am married to a fashion designer.

Real peace is more than the absence of war; it is an absence of the causes of war.

I am always going to be true to myself.

True security lies not in the things one has, but in the things one can do without.

So every bondman in his own hand bears The power to cancel his captivity.