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

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.

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.

The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.

I will not have youbuild me into your lifewhen what i want is tobuild a life with you

Why, the club was just the quietest place in the world, a place where a woman could run in to brush her hair and wash her hands, and change her library book, and have a cup of tea.

You surely remember your past when you rebuke me in honesty.

O God! that bread should be so dear And flesh and blood so cheap!

The devil has a Ph.D. in perfect logic.

Forget what it was. Look at what it is.

The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood.

And if it feels good... Feel it!

We ourselves are not an illusory part of Reality; rather are we Reality itself illusorily conceived.