Kenzaburō Ōe quotes

Kenzaburō Ōe was a renowned Japanese novelist and Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. His works often explore themes of personal trauma, social responsibility, and the complexities of postwar Japanese society. He became one of Japan’s most influential literary voices, both domestically and internationally. Here are 46 of his quotes:

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.

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.

Kenzaburō Ōe

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

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.

Kenzaburō Ōe

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

Kenzaburō Ōe

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

Kenzaburō Ōe

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

Kenzaburō Ōe

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

Kenzaburō Ōe

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

Kenzaburō Ōe

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

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.

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.

Kenzaburō Ōe

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

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.

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.

Kenzaburō Ōe

The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.

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.

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.

Kenzaburō Ōe

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

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.

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.

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.

Kenzaburō Ōe