Haruki Murakami Quotes
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My imagination is a kind of animal. So what I do is keep it alive.
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I'm a writer. I don't support any war. That's my principle.
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I try not to think about anything special while running. As a matter of fact, I usually run with my mind empty. However, when I run empty-minded, something naturally and abruptly crawls in sometime. That might become an idea that can help me with my writing.
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I think most people live in fiction...That's how you keep your fragile body intact.
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I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.
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Why do people have to build such depressing places? I'm not saying that every nook and cranny of the world has to be beautiful, but does it have to be this ugly?
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Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves.
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It's basically impossible for everybody's justice to prevail or everybody's happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over.
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That's what the world is , after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.
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Listen - God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like--they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American comping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o--God's no longer God. A very postmodern kind of thing. If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't.
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For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.
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I'd made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it.
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What the world needs is a set villain that people can point at and say, “It’s all your fault!
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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.
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If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.
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A person’s destiny is something you look back at afterwards, not something to be known in advance.
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That was the rule. Break one of my rules once, and I’m bound to break many more.
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Writing is fun - at least mostly. I write for four hours every day. After that I go running. As a rule, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That's easy to manage.
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I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.
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You're afraid of imagination and even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the resposibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination but you can't supress dreams.
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Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely.
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Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.
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I never made any plan before writing, however I succeeded. I enjoyed writing with excitement ,"what happen on the next page?"
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I can't imagine how American readers will react to a novel, but if the story is appealing it doesn't matter much if you don't catch all the detail. I'm not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens.