“Since language produces meaning within an enclosed system, there is always a built-in untranslatability, which national languages began to deliberately pursue. The process added to the creation of ...”

“let us start by picturing the Japan archipelago lying in the sea by the Chinese mainland. If its proximity allowed it to become part of the Sinosphere and acquire a written culture, its distance be...”

“The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must strugg...”

“Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place....”

“Art is not democratic. Art is sublime.”

“Writing a modern novel in a national language hence means writing with the awareness that you inhabit the same world as others around the globe. You see the same world map and the same world histor...”

“War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up some failure on the part of the adults.”

“War is the echo that never dies. No society strives for war, they are always tricked into it.”

“How can our words ever truly be our own? Since we started growing all we've been taught is to care how we represent our persona and how we should communicate appropriately and how we portrait ourse...”

“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”

“You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the the theme -- and when you so give yourself -- you lose appetite ans sleep -- it cannot be helped --”

“If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.”