Quotes By Haruki Murakami

Most near-future fictions are boring. It's always dark and always raining, and people are so unhappy.

I've been running a full marathon every year for more than 20 years, and my record is getting worse. Getting older, getting worse. It's natural.

Young people these days don't trust anything at all. They want to be free.

Every day I go to my study and sit at my desk and put the computer on. At that moment, I have to open the door. It's a big, heavy door. You have to go into the Other Room. Metaphorically, of course. And you have to come back to this side of the room. And you have to shut the door.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

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.

Most young people were getting jobs in big companies, becoming company men. I wanted to be individual.

It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

Among the many values in life, I appreciate freedom most.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don't know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying - please let me live until I am finished.

If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.

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.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

I don't want to express my opinion about actual politics, because if I do, I have to be responsible for my decision.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

Many people tell me that they don 't know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That's good.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.

I'm not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. I don't get bored.

I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

I don't think of myself as an artist. I'm just a guy who can write.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

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

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

I collect records. And cats. I don't have any cats right now. But if I'm taking a walk and I see a cat, I'm happy.