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? – Arthur Golden
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. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me. – Arthur Golden
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. – Arthur Golden
As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides – man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past. – Arthur Golden
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. – Arthur Golden
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. – Arthur Golden
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. – Arthur Golden
I don’t think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it. – Arthur Golden
I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck. – Arthur Golden
What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible. – Arthur Golden
It is confusing, because in this culture we really don’t have anything that corresponds to geisha. – Arthur Golden
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. – Arthur Golden
Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one. – Arthur Golden