Kenzaburo Oe Quotes

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.

All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.

When I write for myself, I think about myself and draw from my own experience.

I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

I think at the age of 50, everyone should write their own autobiography.

If your life is worth thinking about,it is worth writing about.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.

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.

My father always told me I should be a writer, and I found I loved writing my autobiography; writing is such an interesting process.

There's nothing particularly unique about my experiences except that they're my experiences.

We can't give the truth to someone as an object, we can only point to it, inviting inspection. It is in that spirit that we can hear or read a teaching and then look at our own lives, at our own experiences to see whether anything might have been revealed about them.

The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary.

People think my work is therapeutic. I don't see it that way. It's not like I'm saving money from a weekly therapy visit by writing down my life.

I write in order to find out what I truly know and how I really feel about certain things. Writing requires me to go much deeper into my thoughts and memories than conversation does. Writing provides the solitude necessary to reflect on being in this world.

'Control' had to do with my own life a lot, and that's why that seemed to be a film I could be the director of, because I had an emotional attachment to the whole story. And because of that experience, I feel that I can try other films. I didn't set out to become a director.

I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.

I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.

I'm just not that fascinating a person to have had all those lives that I've written about.