Kenzaburo Oe Quotes

Quotes about:

• There's no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Reading, Reading Experience, Written

  15 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Watches, Care, Green

  "A Personal Matter". Book by Kenzaburo Oe, 1964.

  18 Copy quote

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

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Understanding, Lifestyle, Phony

  "A Personal Matter". Book by by Kenzaburo Oe, 1964.

  16 Copy quote

• It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Jobs, Literature, Firsts

  20 Copy quote

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

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Teacher, Students, Teacher Student

  Kenzaburo Oe (1998). “A Quiet Life”, p.98, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  14 Copy quote

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

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Stills

  "A Personal Matter". Book by Kenzaburo Oe, 1964.

  11 Copy quote

• To be upright and to have an imagination: that is enough to be a very good young man.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Men, Imagination, Enough

  "Conversation with Kenzaburo Oe" by Harry Kreisler, "Conversations with History", Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, globetrotter.berkeley.edu. April 16, 1999.

  12 Copy quote

• The writer's job is the job of a clown …the clown who also talks about sorrow.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Jobs, Sorrow, Clown

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Believe, Writing, Son

  "Art and Healing: Conversation with Kenzaburo Oe". Interview with Harry Kreisler, "Conversations with History" series of the Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, www.youtube.com. April 16, 1999.

  16 Copy quote

• I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Suffering, Form, Novel

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Writing, Thinking, Cosmos

  "Conversation with Kenzaburo Oe" by Harry Kreisler, "Conversations with History", Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, globetrotter.berkeley.edu. April 16, 1999.

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Reflection, Wish, Culture

  57 Copy quote

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

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Hangover, Agony, Suffering

  Kenzaburo Oe, Kenzaburō Ōe (1969). “A Personal Matter”, p.56, Grove Press

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Light, Europe, Soul

  Speech at the Nobel Banquet, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 1994.

  10 Copy quote

• The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Japan, Way, West

  7 Copy quote

• The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  War, Principles, Morality

  "Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself". Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 07, 1994.

  9 Copy quote

• I don't think young people need to see the face of the deceased.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Thinking, People, Needs

  Kenzaburo Oe (1998). “A Quiet Life”, p.69, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Jesus, Men, Effort

  Kenzaburo Oe (1998). “A Quiet Life”, p.96, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  People, Soul, Aftermath

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Prayer, Thinking, Admitting

  "A Quiet Life". Book by Kenzaburo Oe, 1990.

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Voice, Style, Firsts

  "Kenzaburo Oe, The Art of Fiction No. 195". Interviewed with Sarah Fay, www.theparisreview.org. Winter 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• However, please allow me to say that 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.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Writing, Style, Matter

  Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 07, 1994.

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Relationship, Suffering, Different

  7 Copy quote

• By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Reading, Sleep, Night

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Japan, Views, Asia

  "Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself". Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 7, 1994.

  8 Copy quote

Page 1 of 2

← Prev

1

2

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin