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Quotes by Japanese Authors
"Sometimes I feel as if I'm racing with my own shadow."
"Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero actually. I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose."
"What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus."
"I'd heard a lot of Asian people were rooting for me, but I had no idea. I was stunned. They were... impassioned, especially compared to Japan. I couldn't even have anticipated that kind of welcome."
"We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it's gone forever."
"You must not for one instant give up the effort to build new lives for yourselves. Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life."
"If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation."
"People fall in love without reason, without even wanting to. You can't predict it. That's love."
"Dreams are things from the past. They aren't from the future. That wasn't you imprisoned there. You imprison your dreams. You understand?Yeah, I'd say. But I wasn't convinced."
"I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo)"
"I myself, as I'm writing, don't know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don't know the conclusion at all and I don't know what's going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don't know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there's no purpose to writing the story."
"You know, Junpei, everything in the world has its reasons for doing what it does."
"I had no choice in the decision to make myself available. I was not always doing things I wanted to do."
"The thoughts that occur to me while I'm running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky."
"Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action."
"No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist."
"In those days I used to talk to myself as if reciting poetry."
"The world is a huge space, but the space that will take you in - and itdoesn't have to be very big - is nowhere to be found. You seek a voice, but what doyou get? Silence. You look for silence, but guess what? All you hear over and overand over is the voice of this omen. And sometimes this prophetic voice pushes asecret switch hidden deep inside your brain."
"He was glad to be human. For sure, it was a great inconvenience to have to walk on two legs and wear clothes. There were so many things he didn't know. Yet had he been a fish or a sunflower, and not a human being, he might never have experienced this emotion."
"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."
"I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once."
"If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity."
"In our daily lives as programmers, we process text strings a lot. So I tried to work hard on text processing, namely the string class and regular expressions. Regular expressions are built into the language and are very tuned up for use."
"But hell, you've gotta work with what you've got."
"I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else."
"Find fault with thyself rather than with others."
"So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness."
"I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large."
"Rock and roll was my favorite, but before long I grew to enjoy Shinamoto's brand of classical music. This was music from another world, which had its appeal, but more than that I loved it because she was a part of that world."
"Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?"
"I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favorite feeling in the world."
"I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself."
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