Science Fiction Authors

"Literature must be written from the periphery toward the center, and we can criticize the center. Our credo, our theme, or our imagination is that of the peripheral human being. The man who is in the center does not have anything to write. From the periphery, we can write the story of the human being and this story can express the humanity of the center, so when I say the word periphery, this is a most important creed of mine."

"My mentally handicapped son Hikari was awakened by the voices of birds to the music of Bach and Mozart, eventually composing his own works. The little pieces that he first composed were full of fresh splendour and delight. They seemed like dew glittering on grass leaves. The word innocence is composed of in — "not" and nicer — "hurt", that is, "not to hurt". Hikari's music was in this sense a natural effusion of the composer's own innocence."

""The voice of a crying and dark soul" is beautiful, and his act of expressing it in music cures him of his dark sorrow in an act of recovery. Furthermore, his music has been accepted as one that cures and restores his contemporary listeners as well. Herein I find the grounds for believing in the exquisite healing power of art. This belief of mine has not been fully proved. 'Weak person' though I am, with the aid of this unverifiable belief, I would like to "suffer dully all the wrongs" accumulated throughout the twentieth century as a result of the monstrous development of technology and transport. As one with a peripheral, marginal and off-centre existence in the world I would like to seek how — with what I hope is a modest decent and humanist contribution — I can be of some use in a cure and reconciliation of mankind."

"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."

"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."

"In the rest of my lecture I would like to use the word "ambiguous" in accordance with the distinction made by the eminent British poet Kathleen Raine; she once said of William Blake that he was not so much vague as ambiguous. I cannot talk about myself otherwise than by saying "Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself"."

"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. The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War. I trust that the principle can best be understood in the West with its long tradition of tolerance for conscientious rejection of military service. In Japan itself there have all along been attempts by some to obliterate the article about renunciation of war from the Constitution and for this purpose they have taken every opportunity to make use of pressures from abroad. But to obliterate from the Constitution the principle of eternal peace will be nothing but an act of betrayal against the peoples of Asia and the victims of the Atom Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

"Under that title Kawabata talked about a unique kind of mysticism which is found not only in Japanese thought but also more widely Oriental thought. By 'unique' I mean here a tendency towards Zen Buddhism. Even as a twentieth-century writer Kawabata depicts his state of mind in terms of the poems written by medieval Zen monks. Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth. According to such poems words are confined within their closed shells. The readers can not expect that words will ever come out of these poems and get through to us. One can never understand or feel sympathetic towards these Zen poems except by giving oneself up and willingly penetrating into the closed shells of those words."

"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."

"Kawabata Yasunari, the first Japanese writer who stood on this platform as a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, delivered a lecture entitled Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself. It was at once very beautiful and vague. I have used the English word vague as an equivalent of that word in Japanese aiming. This Japanese adjective could have several alternatives for its English translation. The kind of vagueness that Kawabata adopted deliberately is implied in the title itself of his lecture. It can be transliterated as "myself of beautiful Japan". The vagueness of the whole title derives from the Japanese particle "no" (literally "of") linking "Myself" and "Beautiful Japan". The vagueness of the title leaves room for various interpretations of its implications."

"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."

"The ideal teacher student relationship exists when the student is better than the teacher."

"He said he didn’t care if he went to heaven or hell, because neither could be more fearful than absolute nothingness; salvation and damnation were one and the same if the only thing out there was total nothingness."

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

"I think the question for him is, how is a faithless person to cope with life. This is where he believes he can find something upon which to establish a literary career. You know, don’t you, how often he talks of Yeats? This goes way back, to when he was very young."

"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."

"Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you; one loses all relation to you because you die, the other maintains its relation to you because you survive in it. Just as you would take off your clothes, you abandon the universe in which you are still alive. In other words, various universes emerge around each of us the way tree limbs and leaves branch away from the trunk."

"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."

"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."

"Now I was just a transient in the valley, a one-eyed passerby too fat for his years, and life there had the power to summon up neither the memory nor the illusion of any other, truer self. As a passerby I had a right to insist on my identity."

"Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work."

"The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live."

"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."

"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."

"One day Bird had approached his father with this question; he was six years old: Father, where was I a hundred years before I was born? Where will I be a hundred years after I die? Father, what will happen to me when I die? Without a word, his young father had punched him in the mouth, broke two of his teeth and bloodied his face, and Bird forgot the fear of death."

"If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind."

"To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima’s victims."

"It's a little bit like what Akari said to his grandmother in Shikoku, during her final illness: 'Please cheer up and die!"

"We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind."

"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."

"“Wait,” Foyle commanded. He looked at the beaming grin engraved in the steel robot face. “But society can be so stupid. So confused. You’ve witnessed this conference.” “Yes, sir, but you must teach, not dictate. You must teach society.” “To space-jaunte? Why? Why reach out to the stars and galaxies? What for?” “Because you’re alive, sir. You might as well ask: Why is life? Don’t ask about it. Live it.” “Quite mad,” Dagenham muttered. “But fascinating,” Y’ang-Yeovil murmured. “There’s got to be more to life than just living,” Foyle said to the robot. “Then find it for yourself, sir. Don’t ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.” “Why can’t we all move forward together?” “Because you’re all different. You’re not lemmings. Some must lead, and hope that the rest will follow.” “Who leads?” “The men who must … driven men, compelled men.” “Freak men.” “You’re all freaks, sir. But you always have been freaks. Life is a freak. That’s its hope and glory.” “Thank you very much.” “My pleasure, sir.”"

"Millions for defense, but not one cent for survival."

"“That’s me,” he said, motioning to the robot. “That’s all of us. We prattle about free will, but we’re nothing but response...mechanical reaction in prescribed grooves.”"

"Revenge is for dreams...never for reality."

"The man who gives his own decisions priority over society is a criminal."

"“Damn you!" Dagenham raged, “Don’t you realize that you can’t trust people? They don’t know enough for their own good.” “Then let them learn or die. We’re all in this together. Let’s live or die together.”"

"Yes, no matter how we defend ourselves against the outside we’re always licked by something from the inside. There’s no defense against betrayal, and we all betray ourselves."

"“Neither of us is very trustworthy, eh?” “Pfutz!” Reich said emphatically. “We don’t play girl’s rules. We play for keeps, both of us. It’s the cowards and weaklings and sore-losers who hide behind rules and fair play.” “What about honor and ethics?” “We’ve got honor in us, but it’s our own code...not the make-believe rules some frightened little man wrote for the rest of the frightened little men. Every man’s got his own honor and ethics, and so long as he sticks to ’em, who’s anybody else to point the finger? You may not like his ethics, but you've no right to call him unethical.”"

"Powell repressed the wave of exasperation that rose up in him. It was not exasperation with Chooka. It was anger for the relentless force of evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them."

"The mind is the reality. You are what you think."

"Now, these men weren’t idiots. They were geniuses who paid a high price for their genius because the rest of their thinking was other-world. A genius is someone who travels to truth by an unexpected path. Unfortunately, unexpected paths lead to disaster in everyday life."

"This is my first satellite, and d’you know what it's taught me? There’s just one component in any spacecraft that’s guaranteed to give trouble all the time: scientists!"

"He awoke. He was alive. He wasted no time on prayer or thanks but continued the business of survival."

"We always do what’s natural, only sometimes we shouldn’t do it."

"Perhaps there had never been anything at all to see."

"Do you care for me at all? Or do you only need me?"

"I didn’t know anymore what love meant, or why we were not all better off without it."

"She lies like the moon lies, a different face every night, all but one of them false, and the one true face as barren and hard as stone. Why do you believe her?"

"I could not find my way back in dreams, I knew then. They were memory and desire, terror and hope; they told me only what I already knew."

"“Love is what we say it is,” she said fiercely. “That’s all I know. That’s all anyone knows about it. I’m sorry.”"