52 Quotes by Kenzaburō Ōe

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.

Bird, hesitating, recalled a line from the English textbook he was reading with his students; a young American was speaking angrily: Are you kidding me? Are you looking for a fight?

As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life – in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century.