Recently added

Many people may think it is insane of someone endowed with such a potential abundance of power to spend his life producing works of art which no one can see. Well, my own ideas of morality prescribe that only a lunatic would aspire to subordinate the fate of others to his own wishes. I leave it to a higher authority to decide which view is the right one.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written, that’s all.

Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.

“How can the answer to today’s questions be in such an old book?”

“The answers to almost all of today’s questions can be found in old books,” Smyke retorted. “If you want to find out, look them up. If not, forget it.”

One’s memory functions like a spider’s web. Unimportant things – the wind, for example – a web lets through, whereas captured flies become lodged in it and are stored there until the spider needs and devours them.

“Regenschein is dead, my friend. You’re delirious.”

“No one who writes a good book is really dead.”

Shinto values nature and life. This is because Shinto originally arose from a sense of gratitude and awe toward great nature. Our ancestors loved nature, from animals and plants to mountains and rivers. This love of nature is intrinsic to the Japanese character, influencing our art forms as well as our spiritual practices, even in a modern, urbanized nation where millions of people have little apparent contact with nature. In this age when human beings are destroying mother earth in the pursuit of material progress, we should reclaim our love for nature and let it inform our daily lives and spiritual practices.

It symbolizes the three components of power: power, power and power.

You probably suppose that what you heard last night was music. Allow me to correct you: it was acoustic alchemy, hypnosis by means of sound waves. Music is the least resistible of all the arts, so I simply had to make use of it. Try getting an audience to dance by reciting a poem! Try getting them to march! Impossible! Only music can do that.

Writing is a desperate attempt to extract some dignity – and a modicum of money – from solitude.

Curiosity is the most powerful incentive in the world. Why? Because it’s capable of overcoming the two most powerful disincentives in the world: common sense and fear.

In the end, because you become inured to anything you meet in vast numbers, I grew accustomed to the sight of these innumerable skeletons. I ceased to flinch whenever I rounded a bend in a tunnel and was confronted by a skeletal figure with its arm raised in salutation. There was even something comforting about this world of the dead, because the absence of life betokened the absence of danger. All that is evil stems from the living; the dead are a peaceable bunch.