The Creative Gene Quotes

“This safety from harm might cause the imaginative experience of reading a book to be judged inferior to real experience. But that is not the case. Making contact with memes, in the forms of books or movies or other media, provides knowledge and wisdom necessary for going out into the real world; they are legitimate experiences all the same.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“Stories allow you to experience places you could never go - the past, the future, or distant worlds. You can become a different ethnicity or gender. Even when you're reading all by yourself, you're sharing those stories as they unfold before you with countless people whom you've never met.
We are alone, but we are connected.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How Books, Movies, and Music Inspired the Creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“A world without books is inconceivable.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“We live in the era of the search engine. Gone is the era of finding things on your own. If you want to find something, you can use your computer or phone to easily google it. You can find popular restaurants, movies, novels, and fashion anywhere in the world with no challenge. Ours is now a life of passive acquisition. But the joy of finding is gone, as is the catharsis of going to great trouble in searching for something and finding it.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How Books, Movies, and Music Inspired the Creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“Their struggles save me from my loneliness. Their struggles are themselves another story and another meme.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“And the meanings of those stories will change based on the time and circumstances in which they are read. Then, left to each individual recipient, certain elements will be imitated, and others expanded. Through that repeated behavior, new memes are born.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“For me, Akatsuka’s manga was not nonsense; it was a new sense. From that point on, I wanted to be an idiot and a genius.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“But I want to be remembered for what I’ve done, not for any title I’ve held. I want to use what’s left of my life for the sake of my personal mission, not my position.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“Rather than the hopeless loneliness I felt inside crowds of the living, I chose to converse with the dead, whom I could never reach. Rather than the living people who would not understand me, I chose the dead who shared the same understanding as me.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“And much like action or puzzle games, the more you read them, the better you get at it. You’ll gradually learn her patterns and will become able to get ahead of her—and then you can test your skills on the next book. That said, if you get sloppy, Christie will trounce you.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“I want to tell a great many stories, and to build connections between people and each other, and across worlds and times. Those connections may become “the creative genes” that will present us with worlds no one has ever experienced before.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“That’s why I read books, watch movies, and listen to music. I go to art and history museums. I meet people. That repeated process is the only way to learn from history and create the future.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“I suddenly thought of Low Roar’s “I’ll Keep Coming.” ME + ME connected as if the union had been planned from the start, and a new meme came to life.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“There is no active thought process deciding what one thing they need to take along. I think that because of that, they are forgetting the joy that was once found in portability”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“I don’t want to surrender myself in the perpendicular space between fool and genius; I want to put myself on the same plane as them both.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“And so when I exchange business cards, I introduce myself by saying: “I am Hideo Kojima, game designer.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“What a working man requires, more than any title, is his own identity. His own way of living. His own judgment. His own name, given to him by his parents. And the value that name currently holds.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“I haven’t yet become the kind of father that would make me feel satisfied with myself. I may have reached the level of the workaholic Hiroshi, but Charles remains beyond my reach. When will I be able to stop turning to these portraits of a family and make my own worthy one in reality? I want my children to not worship idols as I have, but to be able to look to our own real-life family and be inspired to dream for their futures.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“wish I had a dad like that,” I thought. “No, I want to become a dad like that!” I had lost my own father by then, and my family unit had shrunk to three.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“I still go to a bookstore as close to every day as I possibly can—because bookstores are where I make new encounters.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“If I were to say which particular nutrients have been my vital sustenance for the past forty-three years, they would be movies, music, and novels, in that order.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“Perhaps the test we are faced with now—to preserve the seeds for the future—will be a new way of living (a new meme) in which we cast ourselves adrift from the previous era.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“and though he hadn’t been given the time to pass on his DNA, his arrangement of letters of a different sort will carry on his genetic information in perpetuity.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“The mountain I’ve climbed—the creating of video games—is undergoing a seismic shift, and its form is changing. But I suppose I will keep climbing. Not “because it’s there.” But rather, because it’s not there.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“Hiroko Minagawa, thank you, truly, for opening my eyes. And—though I should have said this earlier—Mom, I’m delighted to have met you.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“By reading translated stories, we made efforts to understand unfamiliar worlds, cultures, and ideologies. We learned an intellectual excitement for the unknown, because that is what would expose us to new worlds. That, more than anything, is where the true pleasure of reading is found.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“Hiroko Minagawa. I’d heard the name before, but I hadn’t read any of her books. My pride as a daily browser of bookstores was deeply wounded.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“Stories and fiction are often criticized as escapism. But in fiction is truth. Fiction can also be a tool at the forefront of the fight to correct the problems of reality.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“Even though I’m part of it, I can’t help but be moved by the wonder of the story that carries the meme of Satoshi Itoh becoming Hideo Kojima, and Hideo Kojima returning to Project Itoh.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“is there. Don’t be concerned about being wrong or having a differing opinion. What wonderful results might arise when you discover a winner with your own eyes and mind? Something that is a winner for me may not be a winner for you, but that’s all right.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid