To this day I do not know whether the power which has inspired my works is something related to religion, or is indeed religion itself.
Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.
History is the study of lies, anyway, because no witness ever recalls events with total accuracy, not even eyewitnesses.
It's dangerous to start attributing your fortunes to luck and your misfortunes to fate.
If you have a dream of writing, that's wishful thinking. If you have a commitment to writing, that's the way to make your dreams come true.
It was at our library that I found Nancy Drew and fell in love with the genre. I've been grateful ever since for those tolerant, book-loving librarians who allowed a child like me to read what I wanted to read.
Where there are problems, there are angels hovering about just waiting for us to ask them to help us transform our suffering into blessings. I'm not being religious, I'm telling you the truth as I have experienced it. . . . And I'm not being trendy either. I was talking to angels long before they got fashionable. . . . So maybe you don't believe in angels, that's all right, they don't care. They're not like Tinkerbell, you know, they don't depend on your faith to exist. A lot of people didn't believe the earth was round either, but that didn't make it any flatter.
I believe such passion-even passion born of fear and anxiety-is far better than a life of banality.
Not to gain time, but maybe to lose it, to see it pass.
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.
It may be argued that to know one kind of beetle is to know them all. But a species is not like a molecule in a cloud of molecules-it is a unique population.