Haruki Murakami Quotes

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”

“And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”

“It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine.”

“You need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a lifetime, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”

“If possible, I would like my readers to savor that same emotion when they read my books. I want to open a window in their souls and let the fresh air in. This is what I think of, and hope for, as I write—purely and simply.”

“You need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much.”

“It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind.”

“There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.”

“I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you.”

“When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.”

“Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us.”

“Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live.”

“Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level.”

“My whole body thrilled at the thought of how wonderful — and how difficult — it is to be able to sit at my desk, not worrying about time, and concentrate on writing.”

“After I interviewed those people, I didn't know how to feel, because I got the impression that they are different, but they are I. I was feeling some empathy for them, but at the same time, I hate them. That's a very complex feeling, the mixture of love and hate.”

“I sometimes write very unhealthy things. Weird things. Twisted things. I think you have to be very healthy if you want to write unhealthy things. That's a paradox, but it's true.”

“So many writers write small, shallow things in a complicated, difficult style. I think what I want to do is write serious, complicated, difficult things in a very easy style that is fluid and comfortable to read.”

“In life, I am myself and I cannot be other people, but in fiction I can be anybody. I can put my feet in other people's shoes. You could call that a kind of therapy. If you can write, you're not fixed.”

“No matter how mundane some action might appear, if you keep at it long enough, it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act.”

“It's been clear that Haruki Murakami is the one contemporary writer who, if he'd failed to exist, we would have failed utterly to invent for ourselves.”

“When I'm in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters, then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation.”