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Quotes by Japanese Authors
"There's not a branch of publishing or broadcasting that doesn't depend in some way on advertising. It'd be like an aquarium without water. Why, ninety-five percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for."
"I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling."
"Unable to sleep after the others had drowsed off, I crawled out of the tent and lay on the ground, looking at the sky. Now and then, a shooting star would trace a bright arc across the heavens. The longer I watched, though, the more nervous it made me. There were simply too many stars, and the sky was too vast and deep. A huge, overpowering foreign object, it surrounded me, enveloped me, and made me feel almost dizzy. Until that moment, I had always thought that the earth on which I stood was a solid object that would last forever. Or rather, I had never thought about such a thing at all. I had simply taken it for granted."
"The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird."
"In response to my father-in-law's view, I offered no opinion. He was not looking for my opinion. He had merely been spouting his belief, a conviction that would remain unchanged for all eternity."
"Mothering your man is not sexy for you or for him. If you want your man to 'start being a man', start being his lover not his mother."
"I think most readers would say the same. Most would choose Midori. And the protagonist, of course, chooses her in the end. But some part of him is always in the other world and he cannot abandon it. It's a part of him, an essential part. All human beings have a sickness in their minds. That space is a part of them."
"A friend to kill time is a friend sublime."
"To Tengo, sexual desire was fundamentally an extension of a means of communication. And so, to look for sexual desire in a place where there was no possibility of communication seemed inappropriate to him."
"The world is full of ways and means to waste time."
"As if a great creature had grown old without being able to express its feelings. Not that it didn't know how to express them, but rather it didn't know what to express."
"As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don't necessarily write down what I'm thinking; it's just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths."
"It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me."
"I wasn't in love with her. And she didn't love me. For me the question of love was irrelevant. What I sought was the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial. I had no idea what that was. But I wanted to thrust my hand right inside her body and touch it, whatever it was."
"You may not appreciate the value of a key until you encounter the door it locks or unlocks."
"Every person should decide for himself how happy, or unhappy, our society might be."
"Life is a continuous learning experience."
"Necessity is an independent concept. It has a different structure from logic, morals, or meaning. Its function lies entirely in the role it plays. What doesn't play a role shouldn't exist. What necessity requires does need to exist. That's what you call dramaturgy."
"The easiest way to have a peek behind the curtain is to learn from those that are ahead of you."
"Not being able to find the right words at crucial times is one of my many problems."
"You're here, I continued. "At least you look as if you're here. But maybe you aren't. Maybe it's just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you've hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys."
"I've been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind."
"In you is the ability that will move you from nonentity and mediocrity to an entity of meteority. Take responsiblity now!"
"Between goal and success, there is one critical thing - perseverance: it is the fundamental belief to always succeed, the determination to turn goal to gold, the greatness to never give up, the foresight to dream that enables you to make it happen."
"It's a fine moon', she repeated."
"She was a keen observer, a precise user of language, sharp-tongued and funny. She could stir your emotions. Yes, really, that's what she was so good at - stirring people's emotions, moving you. And she knew she had this power...I only realized later. At the time, I had no idea what she was doing to me."
"You're afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination. But you can't suppress dreams."
"Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)"
"I thought about Kizuki. "So you finally made Naoko yours," I heard myself telling him. Oh, well, she was yours to begin with. Now maybe, she's where she belongs. But in this world, in this imperfect world of the living, I did the best I could for Naoko."
"I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal."
"If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world -- close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies."
"I wasn't able to be that person for you, and I did a terrible thing. I feel awful about it. But there was something wrong between us from the start, as if we'd done the buttons up wrong."
"We walked side by side to the station. The sweater kept me comfortable in the night air."Okay, I'll keep plugging away, she said."Wasn't much help, was I?"No, actually, it took a load off me just to be able to talk.We caught trains going in opposite directions from the same platform."You're really not lonely? she asked one last time. And while I was searching for a good reply, her train came."
"True, luck may rule over parts of a person's life and luck may cast patches of shadow across the ground of our being, but where there's a WILL-- much less a strong will to swim thirty laps or run twenty kilometers -- there's a way to overcome most any trouble with whatever stepladders you have around."
"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)"
"Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror."
"Self-discovery is life recovery."
"What alternative is there to the media's "Us versus "Them? The danger is that if it is used to prop up this "righteous position of "ours all we will see from now on are ever more exacting and minute analyses of the "dirty distortions in "their thinking. Without some flexibility in our definitions we'll remain forever stuck with the same old knee-jerk reactions, or worse, slide into complete apathy."
"People may laugh at what I do but am not perturbed. My work is to add value to lives. I will keep living my dreams so that by the time my mortal body may stop working, I will remain immortally relevant to generations to come."
"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."
"No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist."
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