Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.

There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person's heart.

Kafka is one of my very favorite writers. Kafka's fictional world is already so complete that trying to follow in his steps is not just pointless, but quite risky, too. What I see myself doing, rather, is writing novels where, in my own way, I dismantle the fictional world of Kafka that itself dismantled the existing novelistic system.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

I probably still haven’t completely adapted to the world. I don’t know, I feel like this isn’t the real world. The people, the scene: they just don’t seem real to me.

That's how people live in the real world: forcing stuff on each other.

No, I don't want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don't like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can.

What the world needs is a set villain that people can point at and say, “It’s all your fault!

I was dying. Like all the other people who live in this world.

One last word of advice, though, Mr. Okada, though you may not want to hear this. There are things in this world it is better not to know about. Of course, those are the very things that people most want to know about. It's strange.

What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.

It wasn’t in books. It wasn’t in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.

I'd like to speak a foreign language well enough to get the jokes. I'd like to talk with Socrates, and watch Michelangelo sculpt David. I'd like to see the world as it was a million years ago and a million years hence.

I wanted to be a citizen of the world but not in a superficial way.

The world does not need tourists who ride by in a bus clucking their tongues. The world as it is needs those who will love it enough to change it, with what they have, where they are.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out into the world it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Is it always to be a winners-losers world, or can we keep everyone in the game? Do we still have what it takes to find a better way?

The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a, from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.

All the parties of capitalist society, all its moralists and all its sycophants will perish beneath the debris of the impending catastrophe. The only party that will survive is the party of the world socialist revolution...

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

The Soviet State does not need either illusions or camouflage. It can claim only that world authority which is confirmed by the facts.

The clearer and deeper the public opinion of the world, in the first instance the opinion of the working masses, will understand the contradictions and the difficulties of the socialist development of an isolated country, the higher will it appreciate the results achieved. The less it identifies the fundamental methods of Socialism with the zigzags and errors of the Soviet bureaucracy, the less will be the danger that, by the inevitable revelation of these errors and of their consequences, the authority, not only of the present ruling group, but of the workers' State itself, may decline.

Socialist economy cannot reject the huge advantages of the world division of labor: on the contrary, it will carry it to the highest development. But in practise, it is not a question of the future socialist society, with an established internal equilibrium, but of the given technically and culturally backward country which in the interests of industrialisation and collectivization is forced to export as much as possible in order to import as much as possible.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.