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

Kenzaburo Oe

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Kenzaburo Oe
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: January 31
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Rijsel
Ōe Kenzaburō
Oe Kenzaburo
Kenzaburo Oe
Kenzaburou Oue
Myth
Destroy
Second
Create
Literature
Jobs
Firsts
First

More quotes by Kenzaburo Oe

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My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.
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The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic.
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If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind.
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There's no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written.
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The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.
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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.
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Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.
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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.
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To be upright and to have an imagination: that is enough to be a very good young man.
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The ideal teacher student relationship exists when the student is better than the teacher.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In the recent years there have been criticisms levelled against Japan suggesting that she should offer more military forces to the United Nations forces and thereby play a more active role in the keeping and restoration of peace in various parts of the world.
Kenzaburo Oe
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The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.
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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.
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The writer's job is the job of a clown …the clown who also talks about sorrow.
Kenzaburo Oe
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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.
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The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.
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