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A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

Haruki Murakami

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Haruki Murakami
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: January 12
Athletics Competitor
Essayist
Linguist
Novelist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Kyōto
Murakami Haruki
Author
Fortunate
Lifetime
Novel
Maybe
Write
Writing
Twelve
Novels

More quotes by Haruki Murakami

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Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.
Haruki Murakami
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The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.
Haruki Murakami
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And when you come back to Japan next summer, let's have that date or whatever you want to call it. We can go to the zoo or the botanical garden or the aquarium, and then we'll have the most politically correct and scrumptious omelets we can find.
Haruki Murakami
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People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.
Haruki Murakami
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If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality!
Haruki Murakami
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Time passes slowly. Nobody says a word, everyone lost in quiet reading. One person sits at a desk jotting down notes, but the rest are sitting there silently, not moving, totally absorbed. Just like me.
Haruki Murakami
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You can hide as cleverly as you like, but in the final analysis mimicry is deception, pure and simple. It doesn't solve a thing.
Haruki Murakami
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You’re here,” I continued. “At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you’ve hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys. Do you think we can go on like this forever?
Haruki Murakami
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You’re optimistic one moment, only to be racked the next by the certainty that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does.
Haruki Murakami
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As long as an individual's alive, he will undergo experience in some form or other, and those experiences are stored up instant by instant. To stop experiencin' is to die.
Haruki Murakami
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How much do you love me?' Midori asked. 'Enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter,' I said.
Haruki Murakami
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People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.
Haruki Murakami
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Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, 'I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.'
Haruki Murakami
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I contented myself with whiskey, for medicinal purposes. It helped numb my various aches and pains. Not that the alcohol actually reduced the pain it just gave the pain a life of its own, apart from mine.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.
Haruki Murakami
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As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.
Haruki Murakami
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I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I?
Haruki Murakami
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That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
Haruki Murakami
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I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven't belonged to any company or any system. It isn't easy to live like this in Japan.
Haruki Murakami