If there were no cherry blossoms in this world How much more tranquil our hearts would be in spring.

Ah, if in this world there were no such thing as cherry blossoms, perhaps then in springtime our hearts would be at peace.

I have always known that at last I would take this road, but yesterday I did not know that it would be today.

Impassionate gods have never seen the red that is the Tatsuta River. /ちはやぶる 神代も聞かず 竜田川 からくれなゐに 水くくるとは

There is very seldom any true secret.

I always feel it is a shortcoming of mine as a reader and as a writer that I frankly need to like somebody.

It takes more to make one sage today than it did to make the seven of Greece. And you need more resources to deal with a single person these days than with an entire nation in times past.

By your work you show what you love and what you know.

I think thoughts in my head bounce around in my skull and, if they keep bouncing around in my skull, they get worse and worse. When they come out of my mouth, they make people happy.

True love does not paralyze, but doubles the high qualities of man.

If you're going to paint from photos, make sure you've painted for at least ten years.

Momentum was part of the exhilaration and the exhaustion of the twentieth century which Coward decoded for the British but borrowed wholesale from the Americans.

God created us with sexual passion so that there would be language to describe what it means to cleave to him in love and what it means to turn away from him to others.

I write what I write.