An Artist's Concern Is To Capture Beauty

I Work Very Regular Hours, Roughly 9 To 5:30. I Think I Have It Much Easier Than A Lot Of Parents. I Just Sit At Home, I Have A Very Flexible Timetable, And I'm Very Fortunate In That I Don't Have Money Problems. I Have Lunch With My Wife At Home. I Don't Have To Commute, So I Have Much More Time With My Family.

I Discovered That My Imagination Came Alive When I Moved Away From The Immediate World Around Me.

If You Go To Tokyo, I Think It Becomes Very Obvious That There's This Almost Seamless Mixture Of Popular Culture And Japanese Traditional Culture.

The Book Was At A Reasonably High Position On The New York Times... Before I Was In The Country. I Thought It Would Be An Interesting Experiment To See If My Presence Here Would Push It Up Or Down.

And What Made These Heart-to-hearts Possible--you Might Even Say What Made The Whole Friendship Possible During That Time--was This Understanding We Had That Anything We Told Each Other During These Moments Would Be Treated With Careful Respect: That We'd Honor Confidences, And That No Matter How Much We Rowed, We Wouldn't Use Against Each Other Anything We'd Talked About During Those Sessions.