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"Aestheticism itself is intrinsically decadent, since the emphasis on beauty leaves little room for nature. To prioritize beauty and art is already to go against nature... 'Art for art’s sake' is no more than a temporary evasion."
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Mishima writes: "For the aesthete, beauty can be no more than a relative salvation. What comes in the end is the absolute salvation of God."

"[Proximity with crime] helps him [the novelist] to feel proud of his isolation from the judgment of society, brings him into close affinity with the pride of an unrepentant criminal... Society wears a mask of humanism, but the novelist knows that behind that mask lurks a lurid curiosity, and indeed fondness, for evil. No one who ventures beyond that point is uncon­nected to the loneliness of the criminal." Mishima

"In her celebrated essay 'Against Interpretation' Susan Sontag observed that we have lost 'the innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.' To interpret art, Sontag argues, is to impoverish it by reducing it to its content."

"The project of aestheticism was innately interdisci­plinary in its attempt to translate visual images, and also music, into words, as if painting with language... Mishima works along similar lines in his essays and articles on art, providing literary equivalents for the imaginative effects that paintings and sculptures have produced in him."

"Modern people are most uncomfortable when they are commanded to lay bare their true emotions. It is a cruel command that is impossible to obey. Modern people have all sorts of faces available to them. But “true emotion” has become just another one of those masks. Indeed, it is actually easier to believe that it is a mask. Hence laying bare one’s true emotions is really no more difficult than choosing a mask."

"Then the terroristic destruction of Mishima Yukio, beautiful, unique, glittering, iconic symbol of centuries of Japanese cultural tradition, will have the function of a spectacular religious ritual for wreaking vengeance on a world that ought to have died and yet did not die..."

"What [Takehiko] Noguchi wants us to understand is that the memory of this intoxication lingered, engendering confused and difficult feelings among many Japanese: nostalgia for that lost intoxication, a frustrated sense of destiny unfulfilled, a profound guilt at having survived the war, and even an unutterable resentment that the emperor too had not perished."

"Only after the war ended did I come to understand that the war had been an erotic time. It was a time when all the little pieces of vulgar eroticism that proliferate today were gathered together and purified in one giant Eros. Those who preach peace may not like to acknowl­edge it, but the fact is that war is more than just misery."
Mishima in August of 1965, on the 20th anniversary of Japan's defeat.

"Mishima’s contemporaries were inclined to interpret his work and his persona as the expression of a trauma that was not his alone, but which was embedded in the minds of young Japanese men of his generation who had experienced the intoxication of the community unto death and yet, randomly and unexpectedly, had outlived it."

"Mishima’s fascination with the triad of beauty, eroticism, and violent death is not as idiosyncratic as many commentators have suggested. To a large degree it is of its time... Japan’s military promoted an ideology of glorified death, instructing soldiers never to surrender but instead to 'shatter like crystal' on the battlefield... [media] exalted the virtue of 'falling like cherry petals' for the emperor."