Haruki Murakami Quotes
-
Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.
-
Everyone may be ordinary, but they're not normal.
-
In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.
-
Age certainly hadn't conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.
-
So many dreams, so many disappointments, so many promises. And in the end, they all just vanish.
-
A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born but you can choose how you die.
-
Deep rivers run quiet.
-
They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?
-
It seems to me that very sad things always contain an element of the comical.
-
To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there's sex as therapy self-therapy, that is and there's sex as pastime.
-
Strong and independent? I’m neither. I’m just being pushed along by reality, whether I like it or not.
-
I didn't have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it's fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.
-
I've always liked libraries. They're quiet and full of books and full of knowledge.
-
A strange, terrific force unlike anything I've ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will--over and over.
-
Somewhere in his body--perhaps in the marrow of his bones--he would continue to feel her absence.
-
Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.
-
Probably." "Again with the probablys." "A world full of probablys," she said.
-
I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing.
-
Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.
-
It's not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that's not real friendship.
-
For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.
-
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.
-
Any explanation or logic that explains everything so easily has a hidden trap in it. I'm speaking from experience. Somebody once said if it's something a single book can explain, it's not worth having explained. What I mean is don't leap to any conclusions.
-
Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match.