Quotes by Arthur Golden

• What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.
• It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha.
• Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.
• Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.
• This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English.
• What I really wanted to know, though, was what it was like to be a geisha? Where do you sleep? What do you eat? How do you have your hair done?
• We can never flee the misery that is within us.
• I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.
• Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.
• You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper.
• This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.
• I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha.
• I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
• I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.
• Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.
• Adversity is like a strong wind; it tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.
• Adversity is like a strong wind, it tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we truly are.
• Adversity is like a strong wind, it tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so we see ourselves as we really are.