Quotes from Akira Kurosawa

Yama-san was the best kind of teacher. Yama-san, I promise you I'll try a little harder, a little longer. This is the memorial speech I offer up to Yama-san.

For me to try to analyze and explain Japanese society from that point of view was therefore impossible. I simply felt the vague dissatisfactions and dislikes that Japanese society encouraged, and in order to contend with these feelings, I had joined the most radical movement I could find. Looking back on it now, my behavior seems terribly frivolous and reckless.

To put it more precisely, I used the fact that I could not contact them as an excuse to extricate myself from this painful illegal political movement. It was not a case of the leftist movement's fever dying down; it was a case of my own leftist fever not having been a very serious one.

I had seen my brother's name in the Cinema Palace newspaper advertisements. If I climbed back up the winding path on the hill I had just come down, I would be at his home. As I have been writing this, a poem by Nakamura Kusadato suddenly comes to mind: Coming down the winding trail, The springtime voice of the crying calf.

Preparing for this second shot, the actress playing the daughter (Todoroki Yukiko) asked me, "Mr. Kurosawa, do I just pray for my father's victory?" I replied, "Yes, that's right, but while you're at it, you might as well pray for the success of this picture, too.

Qué trágico que el hombre nunca pueda darse cuenta de lo hermosa que es la vida hasta que se encuentra cara a cara con la muerte

For a director, each work he completes is like a whole lifetime. I have lived many whole lifetimes with the films I have made, and I have experienced a different life-style with each one as well.

La vida es breve, enamoraos, doncellas... Antes de que la flor carmesí se desvanezca de vuestros labios... Antes de que las mareas de la pasión se enfríen dentro de vosotras... Para aquellos que no conocen el mañana... La vida es breve, enamoraos, doncellas... Antes de que nuestras trenzas de cuervo comiencen a desvanecerse... Antes de que las llamas de vuestros corazones parpadeen y mueran... Para aquellos a quienes el hoy nunca volverá...

I like unformed characters. This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself; in any case, it is in watching someone unformed enter the path to perfection that my fascination knows no bounds.

No puedo permitirme odiar a nadie. No tengo tanto tiempo

In one such rented attic room was a young man who made his living selling fish. Every morning he would get up before the crack of dawn and carry his tin box to the riverbank, where he bought his goods. He worked furiously for an entire month, and then at the end of the month he put on his finest clothes and went out to buy a prostitute—as if that made it all worthwhile.

I had no idea what role these popular arts of storytelling and singing would play in my future; I just enjoyed them without thinking about it.

Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet?

Seeing how much hope my father still cherished for my prospects as an artist, I felt like starting over in painting. I began sketching again.

My brother had always said that. He claimed that when human beings lived past thirty, all they did was become uglier and meaner, so he had no intention of doing so.

So when my mother expressed her concern to me, I laughed it away, saying, "People who talk about dying don't die.

The relative who had said "What are you doing?" when I was paralyzed at the sight of my brother's corpse had not been able to intimidate me, but I could not forgive myself for what I had said to my mother. And how terrible the results had been for my brother. What a fool I am!

Uekusa Keinosuke has also said my personality is like that of a sunflower, so there must be some truth to the allegation that I am more sanguine than my brother was. But I prefer to think of my brother as a negative strip of film that led to my own development as a positive image.

I became impatient with my own aimlessness.

In other words, I did not—and still don't—have a completely personal, distinctive, way of looking at things.

At this time of my life I did not have a great deal of enthusiasm for Japanese movies, in comparison with foreign pictures. But my interests were still those of a child.

To develop a personal vision isn't easy. But when I was a young man, this insufficiency caused me not only dissatisfaction but uneasiness. I felt I had to fashion my own way of seeing, and I became more impatient. Every exhibition I went to seemed to prove to me that every painter in Japan had his own personal style and his own personal vision. I became more and more irritated with myself.

I went straight to my father and begged him to enter me in Ochiai's fencing school. He was overjoyed. I don't know if my interest had occasioned a resurgence of the samurai blood in my father's veins or the reawakening of his military-academy teacher's spirit, but, whichever it was, the effect was remarkable.

But lately tenpura-soba doesn't taste like it used to.