I liked science very much. A science teacher in high school inspired me, and because of him, I began studying science at the university. But when I got there... well, the subject still attracted me a lot, but I had to do all these exams, and it was just like working in an office. I couldn't stand that.

I did study the art of being a barber because I wanted to figure out what my routine would be. Do you start in the front or back? Top or bottom? Swivel the chair or walk around? What I did discover is there's no such thing as the perfect haircut!

When I was making my debut as an artist, I felt that it was very important that I try to combine the background of my own culture, my people, and the country into the contemporary art world. So that's how I came up with the term 'superflat.'

I don't think it's an unnatural thing at all for my collaborations or projects to be seen as art but entertainment at the same time.

In Japan, I am famous in certain special circles - mainly as someone who is trying to break down and enlighten the conventions of Japanese art.

When I was little, I guess I was just an ordinary kid. But then things changed when I was in junior high. You know, kids that become geeks become one because of something. Like, they aren't good at sports, or girls don't like them. I, too, for some reason, got into things like science fiction and, well, especially science fiction as an escape.

My own belief is that rather than getting involved in trying to change the reality of social-political things, creators can be involved in and express in different ways and be meaningful in different ways, so for me, it's important to leave messages to people of the future and to be engaged with the people now.

Manga uses Japanese traditional structures in how to teach the student and to transmit a very direct message. You learn from the teacher by watching from behind his back. The whole teacher-master thing is part of Asian culture, I think.

The theme my generation explored was the relationship between capitalism and art.

There were no museums or galleries in Shanghai, but I was very keen on art - I was always sketching and copying, and sometimes I think that my whole career as a writer has been the substitute work of an unfulfilled painter.

Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.

In March 1943, my parents, four-year-old sister and I were interned with other foreign civilians at Lunghua camp, a former teacher training college outside Shanghai, where we remained until the end of August 1945.

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.

I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves.

I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.

There's a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.

Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light.

The character of instrumental music... lets the emotions radiate and shine in their own character without presuming to display them as real or imaginary representations.

Life is only a long and bitter suicide, and faith alone can transform this suicide into a sacrifice.

Beware of missing chances; otherwise it may be altogether too late some day.

A good mother remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children, is an active and beloved community volunteer. She remembers to make play dates, her children's clothes fit, she does art projects with them and enjoys all their games.

Before I was married, I didn't consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn't do 'do-it-yourself.' When my father needed to hammer something he generally used his shoe, and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers.

Another parent's different approach raises the possibility that you've made a mistake with your child. We simply can't tolerate that because we fear that any mistake, no matter how minor, could have devastating consequences. So we proclaim the superiority of our own choices. We've lost sight of the fact that people have preferences.

So many women today have become so focused on their children, they've developed these romantic entanglements with their children's lives, and the husbands are secondary. They're left out. And the romantic focus is on the children.

Is Valentine's Day a day to make cupcakes with your children? No, Valentine's is supposed to be a day about romantic love.

There are times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you'd be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature.

I was a lesbian for a semester at Wesleyan - it was a graduation requirement.

I'm sure there are people who survive tragedy without humor, but I've never met any of them. Nor would I be particularly interested in writing about them if I did meet them.

Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off.

All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They've been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.

The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing.

There are movements which impinge upon the nerves with a strength that is incomparable, for movement has power to stir the senses and emotions, unique in itself.

What a beautiful art, but what a wretched profession.

Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice.

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.

The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.

In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.

I've had trouble now and again in Nigeria because I have spoken up about the mistreatment of factions in the country because of difference in religion. These are things we should put behind us.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.