52 Quotes by Kenzaburō Ōe

"The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition."

"To be upright and to have an imagination: that is enough to be a very good young man."

"There could be joy in destruction, too, couldn't there? Isn't Jesus Christ's Second Coming supposed to occur only after a lot of unmitigated destruction? But again, human history is fraught with tragedies in which man spared no effort to destroy with millenarian joy, only to learn that no messiah appeared afterwards."

"There's no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written."

"I think, we can only write very personal matters through our experience. When I named my first novel about my son A Personal Matter, I believe I knew the most important thing: there is not any personal matter; we must find the link between ourselves, our personal matter, and society."

"It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it."

"I don’t think young people need to see the face of the deceased."

"I think I am doing my works to link myself, my family, with society – with the cosmos. To link me with my family to the cosmos, that is easy, because all literature has some mystic tendency. So when we write about our family, we can link ourselves to the cosmos."

"From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan’s prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large."

"There’s no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written."