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For an artist to do creative work, he needs at once physical health and some physiomental ill health. He needs both serenity and gloom.

Yukio Mishima

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Yukio Mishima
Age: 45 †
Born: 1925
Born: January 14
Died: 1970
Died: November 25
Actor
Author
Critic
Essayist
Film Actor
Film Director
Lyricist
Military Personnel
Model
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
City of Tokyo
Mishima Yukio
Kimitake Hiraoka
Hiraoka Kimitake
Creativity
Health
Creative
Artist
Needs
Gloom
Work
Serenity
Ill
Physical

More quotes by Yukio Mishima

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Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.
Yukio Mishima
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He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young—and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death—as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.
Yukio Mishima
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The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.
Yukio Mishima
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It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.
Yukio Mishima
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All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.
Yukio Mishima
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It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony.
Yukio Mishima
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There's a huge seal called 'impossibility' pasted all over this world. And don't ever forget that we're the only ones who can tear it off once and for all.
Yukio Mishima
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The only people in this world I really trust are my fans - even if they do forget you so fast.
Yukio Mishima
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Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.
Yukio Mishima
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An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
Yukio Mishima
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The mind, by its very nature, persistently tries to live forever, resisting age and attempting to give itself a form... . When a person passes his prime and his life begins to lose true vigor and charm, his mind starts functioning as if it were another form of life it imitates what life does, eventually doing what life cannot do.
Yukio Mishima
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I cried sobbingly until at last those visions reeking with blood came to comfort me. And then I surrendered myself to them, to those deplorably brutal visions, my most intimate friends.
Yukio Mishima
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The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.
Yukio Mishima
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Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
Yukio Mishima
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The images which the [press] photographer has filtered from reality, whether particular events or the anguish of human reactions to them, already bear a stamp of authenticity which the photographer is powerless to alter by one jot or tittle the meaning of the objects, by a process of purification, itself becomes the theme of the work.
Yukio Mishima
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..and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions that death took root at the moment of birth and man’s only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it that propagation was a fiction consequently, society was a fiction too that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin.
Yukio Mishima
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Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed.
Yukio Mishima
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...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.
Yukio Mishima
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I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line.
Yukio Mishima
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When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.
Yukio Mishima