Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.
Like many other kids, I liked watching anime.
We want to see the newest things. That is because we want to see the future, even if only momentarily. It is the moment in which, even if we don't completely understand what we have glimpsed, we are nonetheless touched by it. This is what we have come to call art.
I've been immersed in manga since I was a kid. I grew up with this culture. So I started to think about how to compare manga to contemporary art.
Rather than a big figure, I guess you could say I'm more of an influential minority symbol.
My aesthetic sense was formed at a young age by what surrounded me: the narrow residential spaces of Japan and the mental escapes from those spaces that took the forms of manga and anime.
The concept of minimalism is to relax. Like a Zen monk in training, it is something that brings equilibrium to the heart. I don't necessarily think it has any problems, but if I were to force myself to name one, I would say that since the minimalist feeling already includes its own universe, I think it might kill the drive that we would otherwise have to commit the physically impossible and attempt to travel into outer space.
For me, acting was a way of taking destructive energy and doing something productive with it, and in that way it was quite a life saver.
If you're writing fiction, you're dealing with characters who, themselves, will have heartfelt sentiments but who, themselves, live in this culture right now and thus face all the impediments to sort of dealing with those parts of their lives that, you know, that we did. So it would be not only silly but unrealistic to have a character saying that kind of stuff.
We've got to have major health care reform because that is the 800-pound gorilla. That is the thing that can swamp the boat fiscally for the United States.
[The UN should remain in New York] because every country needs a cesspool. And the UN is always interesting as a theater of the absurd.