Kenzaburō Ōe quotes

The fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world. (Kenzaburō Ōe)
I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
The ideal teacher student relationship exists when the student is better than the teacher. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
To be upright and to have an imagination: that is enough to be a very good young man. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
The writer's job is the job of a clown ...the clown who also talks about sorrow. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind. (Kenzaburō Ōe)
The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
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. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
I don't think young people need to see the face of the deceased. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
Fundamentally a good author has his or her own sense of style. There is a natural, deep voice, and that voice is present from the first draft of a manuscript. When he or she elaborates on the initial manuscript, it continues to strengthen and simplify that natural, deep voice. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
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. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
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. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
At the nadir of the post-war economic poverty we found a resilience to endure it, never losing our hope for recovery. It may sound curious to say so, but we seem to have no less resilience to endure our anxiety about the ominous consequence emerging out of the present prosperity. 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. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
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. (Kenzaburō Ōe)
The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic. View quote
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. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
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. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe
To talk of prayer after admitting he professed no faith was, in my opinion, a breach of common courtesy. In this sense, he did make a social blunder, for which I think he well deserved some minor castigation. View quote
Kenzaburō Ōe