"I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me."

"Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki."

"We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they're capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don't care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they've done wrong."

"I loved cowboy films and TV series, and I learned bits of English from them. My favorite was 'Laramie', with Robert Fuller and John Smith. I used to watch 'The Lone Ranger', which had been famous in Japan as well. I idolized these cowboys."

"I'm looking for a world where love will no longer be extraordinary."

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

"Wisdom principle 93 tells us that the journey of life is lesson 98."

"But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses."