Murakami Quotes

I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much ... But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird.

People need routines. It's like a theme in music. But it also restrictsyour thoughts and actions and limits your freedom. It structures your priorities and in some cases distorts your logic.

No matter what form the relationship might take, he was the only person she could picture sharing her life with.

Once you let yourself grow close to someone, cutting the ties could be painful.

It doesn’t matter how old I get, but as long as I continue to live I’ll always discover something new about myself.

The most dangerous creature here would have to be me. So maybe I'm just scared of my own shadow.

The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.

Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.

Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world?

Did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work.

A theory is a battlefield in your head.

This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there.

For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.

Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.

It was a strange feeling, like touching a void.

Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us.

I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.

It was a small room with dim light coming in the window, reminiscent of old Polish films.

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

I never trust people with no appetite. It's like they're always holding something back on you.

The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.

The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground

He sometimes wondered if she had become involved with him just so that she could cry in someone's arms. Maybe she can't cry alone, and that's why she needs me.

Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything's possible when it comes to love.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.

If I choose to write about sheep, it's just because I happened to write about sheep. There is no deep significance.

It is very simple, actually. It is because you and Tengo were so powerfully drawn to each other.

Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.

Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.

No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.

I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.

Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me.

When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.

The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.

That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

My father always told me: 'Give somebody a hand and he'll take an arm.

Have your dream...What you need now more than anything is discipline. Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone. (from Thailand)

I don’t know what it means to live.

Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.

I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo)

Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.

Most of the psychological differences between men and women seem to come from differences in their reproductive system