“If the Emperor had not delivered his [15 August 1945] address urging the Japanese people to lay down their swordsif that speech had been a call instead for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Millio...”

“In the pre-war era when itinerant home-remedy salesmen still wandered the country, they had a traditional patter for selling a potion that was supposed to be particularly effective in treating burn...”

“But I prefer to think of my brother as a negative strip of film that led to my own development as a positive image.”

“Granting that there is some truth to the theory that defects in society give rise to the emergence of criminals, I still maintain that those who use this theory as a defense of criminality are over...”

“Being a writer all boils down to this: It's you, in a chair, staring at a page. And you're either going to stay in that chair until words are written, or you're going to give up and walk away. The ...”

“When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.”

“Im likely to stay here, pen in hand, until dusk comes and my writing melts into the twilight.”

“It is a beautiful gift to be a creator.”

“Then, the massive hands lifted the new people up to a pair of giant indescribable lips and whispered, in a fundamentally untranslatable Creator-language, something that meant, approximately: THIS T...”

“You are the creator of your world.”