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For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

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
Needs
Musician
Downstairs
Something
Second
Basement
Really
Stay
Basements
Create
Passage
Stills
Passages
Still
Sane
Find
Musicians
Need
Novelists

More quotes by Haruki Murakami

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Since I'm a novelist I'm the opposite of you - I believe that what's most important is what cannot be measured. I'm not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people's lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible.
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Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they'll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same.
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Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest.
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Knowledge and ability were tools, not things to show off.
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two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes
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I began to draw an invisible boundary between myself and other people. No matter who I was dealing with. I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person’s attitude so that they wouldn’t get any closer. I didn’t easily swallow what other people told me. My only passions were books and music
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You’re really cute, Midori,” I corrected myself. “What do you mean really cute?” “So cute the mountains crumble and the oceans dry up.
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When I was fifteen, all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place beyond the flow of time.” - But there’s no place like that in this world. - Exactly. Which is why I’m living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break.
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That’s what love’s all about. You’re the only one having those wonderful feelings, but you have to go it alone as you wander through the dark your mind and body have to bear it all. All by yourself.
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In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.
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I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn't have to write for my living.
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Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match.
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If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I'd never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit.
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Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.
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I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it's not like that. It happens overnight.
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Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.
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I am struck by how, except when you're young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don't get that sort of system set by a certain age, you'll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.
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Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion
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The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn't going to be veryuseful in the real world, that's for sure.
Haruki Murakami
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Painful is the stress when one cannot reproduce or convey vividly to others, however hard he tries, what he's experienced so intensely.
Haruki Murakami