Star Quotes

“A hidden poetry that will be lost if any mediocrity is shed. Genius is a casualty. The poetry must never be conspicuous — its scent is only detectable when subtle.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“they see and feel draws from the spring of artifice that you and I are guarding. To keep the public pacified, the spring must always be shielded from the world by masks. And these masks are worn by stars.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“No matter how serious the obligation, a star is more of a star if he never arrives. Absence is his forte. The question of whether he'll show up gives the event a ceaseless undercurrent of suspense. But a true star never arrives. Showing up is for second-rate actors who need to seek attention.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“Just as evil never dies, neither does the sentimental.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“I had long since cut ties with that world, like a yakuza stepping out of the game and washing his hands of it once and for all. I had no more use for dreams. Dreaming was for the moviegoers, fingering their pulpy paper tickets. Not for me.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“The fact that every woman out there wanted me but couldn't have me gave Kayo, in her secretive monopoly, the sick pleasure of being the exception. Her ugliness was everything, and she made it plain. Like a saint, she showed her age without apology, not hiding it from me or anyone else. The lie was all we ever needed.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“My job was to come up with a backstory of violence. I’d been a shy kid. All I did was draw. I never came close to fighting anybody. Instead of gambling with the other kids, I chose the blue sky, and treasured not the gold leaf on their playing cards, but the golden sundown rimming actual young leaves. Looking back, I can say that loving nature was an error. Not seeing my affection for the weakness that it was, I put a stain upon my youth.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“Dreaming was for the moviegoers, fingering their pulpy paper tickets”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“The very thing that makes a star spectacular is the same thing that strikes him from the world at large and makes him an outsider.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“Damn, even that trash rolls better than me . . .”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“In the pale light of midnight’s foggy street,
I’m haunted by the goodbye in your eyes.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“All I’m saying is they could carry on about their own dreams all they wanted, but there was no way I could tell them how it felt to live inside one.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“Then again, I’d never touched the moon. For all I knew, its surface felt the same as Kayo’s teeth. If the moon were actually silver, these could be pieces of the real thing. But fakes were what I really wanted.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“I found myself adrift in the lonely expanse that an actor enters upon being criticized, but I remained enveloped in my role as if it were an invisible skin, close and protective.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“Now I could be seen completely. Being seen made me their king. It gave me my authority, and all the people watching were my subjects.
Eyes, countless as the gravel at a shrine, pressed in all around me. They found their center — my image coalesced. In that moment, dressed as a yakuza, I became a sparkling apparition, like a scepter thrust against the sky.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star