Haruki Murakami Quotes
I could have been a cult writer if I'd kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.
Quotes to Explore
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What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
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So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
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I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.
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I love writing journalism because it's all over in two hours and comes straight off the top of the head. Writing novels is soooooo much harder. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.
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Wherever I am, I take books, not novels.
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I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.
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Well I could have been just a writer. I had been a hair dresser. I could have stuck with that.
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I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.
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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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I was just as voracious a writer as I was a reader.
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With my songs I tried to prove that there is love.
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There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.
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I'm not a great writer.
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When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.
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That's why I love crime novels so much: When I write a crime novel, the conflict is built in.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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When somebody asks what I do, I guess I say 'writer' first.
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I haven't given any thought to collaborating with my sisters. It would be great fun. My daughter Molly is a wonderful writer - someday I'd love to collaborate with her.
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I feel like, if you're writing the same songs you were writing when you were 17 in your 30s, something's wrong. As a grown man, you're more confident, and you have less to prove.
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Like so many children who read a lot, I begin to declare rather early that I want to be a writer. But this is the only way I have of articulating a different desire, a desire that I can’t yet understand. What I really want is to be transported into a space in which everything is as distinct, complete, and intelligible as in the stories I read. And, like most children, I’m a literalist through and through. I want reality to imitate books – and books to capture the essence of reality. I love words insofar as they correspond to the world, insofar as they give it to me in a heightened form. The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become – and such lucidity is a form of joy. Sometimes, when I find a new expression, I roll it on the tongue, as if shaping it in my mouth gave birth to a new shape in the world. Nothing fully exists until it is articulated.
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Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.
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I got through yesterday, I'll get through today.
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So if a Christian is touched only once a year, the touching is still worth it, and maybe on some given Christmas, some quiet morning, the touch will take.
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I could have been a cult writer if I'd kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.
