Kenzaburō Ōe: Personal

Kenzaburō Ōe is Japanese author. Explore interesting quotes on personal.
Kenzaburō Ōe: 86   quotes 45   likes

“I don’t have faith nor do I think I will have it in the future, but I’m not an atheist. My faith is that of a secular person. You might call it “morality.””

Kenzaburō Ōe

Throughout my life I have acquired some wisdom but always through rationality, thought, and experience. I am a rational person and I work only through my own experience. My lifestyle is that of a secular person, and I have learned about human beings that way
Paris Review interview (2007)

Faith , Thinking , Future , Personality

“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

Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)

World , Personality

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

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

Understanding , Personality

“I was on a promotional tour in Great Britain, and I stopped in Wales. I was there for three days and I ran out of books to read. I went to a local bookstore and asked the person working there to recommend some books in English. He suggested a collection by a poet who was from the area but warned me that the book wasn’t selling very well. The poet was R. S. Thomas, and I bought everything they had. As I read him, I realized that he was the most important poet I could be reading at that point in my life.”

Kenzaburō Ōe

Paris Review interview (2007)

Life , Books , Reading , Personality

“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.”

Kenzaburō Ōe

p 52
Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)

Life , Way , Question , Thinking

“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.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

Nature , Personality , Forgetting

“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.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

Grass , Personality

“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.”

Kenzaburō Ōe

Conversations with History interview (1999)

Thinking , Personality