Hideo Kojima > Quotes

“Why are we still here? Just to suffer? Every night, I can feel my leg… and my arm… even my fingers. The body I’ve lost… the comrades I’ve lost… won’t stop hurting… It’s like they’re all still there. You feel it, too, don’t you?”
― Hideo Kojima, Easy ways to make money online at home

“I won't scatter your sorrow to the heartless sea. I will always be with you.”
― hideo kojima

“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

“If you spend your time chasing butterflies, they'll fly away. If you spend your time making a beautiful garden, the butterflies will come to you. And if they don't come, you still have your beautiful garden.”
― Hideo Kojima, Quantum mechanics exercises (1993) ISBN: 4871860329 [Japanese Import]

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with disliking a book that someone else recommended to you. Your judgment was made from your own point of view. If you liked a book simply because someone else praised it, that would be no different than retweeting a post on Twitter; nothing of you”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“By becoming the tiger, I found a different way to pass on my stories than the one I had so rigidly insisted upon. And so, even as a tiger, I intend to keep on howling into the later generations. Those stories will become new memes, not as prose, but as video games.”
― 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

“During the Great War, the German army occupied Kristóf’s village and forced the residents to use the German language. Upon liberating Hungary, the Soviets made learning Russian compulsory in school. In this way, Kristóf’s mother tongue was repeatedly stolen from her amid the ravages of war. As a result, she wrote in what she often called “an enemy language,” and when she wrote these three novels, she elevated the tragic loss of her native language into literature.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“Her contemporaries, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (born 1928), Yukio Mishima (born 1925), and others did much to disseminate transgressive and nonheteronormative memes, which in turn influenced the Year 24 Group—the next generation of creators, such as Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya, and Yumiko Oshima, who fueled the boom of girls’ manga containing themes of same-sex or otherwise forbidden or transgressive romance.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“Books kept the feelings of isolation and loneliness from crushing me. My father’s early death contributed to a lack of role models in my life. But inside books, I was able to find adults and teachers to guide me along.”
― 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

“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

“Separated by distance and time, their letters are sometimes romantic, sometimes regretful, sometimes confessional, and sometimes scolding. Through their discrepancies and similarities, the past and present of the broken couple intertwine with the passing seasons like brocaded embroidery on woven fabric.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“Kojima: I want the players to experience things that are only possible within video games and that have never been done before. Otherwise, there’s no point in making the game.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“A very long time ago, I dreamed that I met a cat. When I awoke, I had returned to being a high school student, and the dream quickly passed from my memory. But as an adult, reading Jennie again, I realized that I had never forgotten the experience of that dream, not even for an instant. Now, as always, I carry Jennie’s meme inside myself. And so, when I declared at the beginning of this essay that I had never had a cat, I was wrong. I had Jennie.”
― 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

“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

“As long as you are walking forward, you will fall into a pit. In that case, should we not try to find the best life in our current pit? Rather than accepting it as it is, or escaping it, or lashing out against it, try to find a new purpose there.”
― Hideo Kojima, The Creative Gene: How books, movies, and music inspired the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“The Creative Gene will form connections—strands—between me and you, and maybe new memes will be made. Toward that hope, I will once again visit a bookstore today and search for strands that I have not yet seen.”
― 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