One of the most difficult things for people who have been successful in sports is adapting to the daily world where you can't get an answer from someone until 5 o'clock tomorrow. There is always an excuse. Living 40 or 50 years like that doesn't get too exciting after a while.

Everyone thought I was going to die like a year later they didn't know. So I helped educate sports and then the world that a man living with HIV can play basketball. He's not going to give it to anybody by playing basketball.

America must be the teacher of democracy not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard.

I think we're living in a world where society is very difficult.

I think we are all interested in end-times ideas and also in the current climate that we are all living in where money is a little harder to come by things continue to get expensive gas prices are not too far from people's heads. There are more and more people. Human society's going to have real problems.

Tolerance is the price we pay for living in a free pluralistic society.

Are we Darwinists - where we live and let live? Or are we nurturing as a society? There has to be a standard of living that we decide to support.

Since I have come to America I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come but while living in America I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.

The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces nor slander us behind our backs nor intrude upon our privacy nor quit their shelves until we take them down.