By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.

From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan's prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large.

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.

After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped.

Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters.

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.

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.

I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.

By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.

The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic.

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.

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.

The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.

Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries.

In Japan itself there have all along been attempts by some to obliterate the article about renunciation of war from the Constitution and for this purpose they have taken every opportunity to make use of pressures from abroad.

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.

The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.

If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind.

By Rice's own standards, the war was well underway by the time he took office. He was a war president the moment he took the oath. But did he act like one?

Under current law volunteers who are not working with an official nonprofit organization are not covered by the Volunteer Protection Act. Therefore, there are absolutely no legal protections for the average American who wishes to volunteer.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something - even if it fails miserably. But I've sort of given up on believing that I'm going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.

I knew I wanted to act, and I was really driven, so I kept going for it. We moved to L.A. full-time when I was 8 or 9.

Maybe I can't act, but I know the gimmicks. I studied acting all my life and know what's good for me.

I've done a lot of acting. I'm not saying I'm the greatest, but I'd love to act, I'd love to sing.

P.C. is just too Big Brother - telling me how I should act and feel.

Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

I'm a 7 o'clock act. My people want to go to a show, a dinner and then go home and go to bed.

For me, romance isn't an over-the-top act. It's someone offering to help and to support me. Or if that person thinks I'm making the wrong decision, he'll tell me. I want him to be honest, because being that honest takes a lot of guts.

I want more children but for the next three years I want to act.

I have to say that it's very few countries that are willing to look back at its past and apologize for its act, or make amends for its act, as the United States had one.

I think unleashing 3,000 smart bombs against the city of Baghdad in the first several days of the war... to me, if those were unleashed against the San Francisco Bay Area, I would call that an act of extreme terrorism.

I cannot sing, dance or act; what else would I be but a talk show host.

My kids act all the time and it's exactly what I used to do.

After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.

Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in, no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for the good.

A marriage is no amusement but a solemn act, and generally a sad one.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

I went to my last three years of high school in New Jersey. I just wanted to act, you know?

Having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that two people in love can commit.

You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something, or that you were forced to, but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself.

Soap opera wouldn't be my first choice, but at this point in my life, I would consider a soap. It would allow me to act and still do other things with my life.

Theatre director: a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.

Act enthusiastic and you will be enthusiastic.

You have people who can't act and they get all these parts. Paris Hilton falls into her own category. She's made a career out of it.

I really started trying to get my act together in August of 2002.

I cannot consistently, with self respect, do other than I have, namely, to deliberately violate an act which seems to me to be a denial of everything which ideally and in practice I hold sacred.

In the last four years under the Patriot Act, we have seen a great increase in the ability of law enforcement officials to investigate and track terrorists.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.