Kenzaburō Ōe - Work Quotes

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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.

Kenzaburō Ōe
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. 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

Kenzaburō Ōe
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
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.

Kenzaburō Ōe
I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites. I am very eager to correct everything. If you look at one of my manuscripts, you can see I make many changes. So one of my main literary methods is repetition with difference. I begin a new work by first attempting a new approach toward a work that I've already written — I try to fight the same opponent one more time. Then I take the resulting draft and continue to elaborate upon it, and as I do so the traces of the old work disappear. I consider my literary work to be a totality of differences within repetition.
I used to say that this elaboration was the most important thing for a novelist to learn.

Kenzaburō Ōe