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Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

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
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Haven
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Anything
Speech
Prize
Like
Trust
Touched
Told
Opposite
Seen
Opposites
Eyes
Acceptance
Jerusalem
Eye
Havens
Novelist
Nature
Exactly
Novelists

More quotes by Haruki Murakami

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Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.
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Mediocrity's like a spot on a shirt—it never comes off.
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That was the rule. Break one of my rules once, and I’m bound to break many more.
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The unwaking world was as hushed as a deep forest.
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I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do. To dream, to live in the world of dreams. But it doesn’t last forever. Wakefulness always comes to take me back.
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Let me tell you something, Mari. The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you've had it: things'll never be the same. All you can do is go on, living alone down there in the darkness.
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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.
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If I choose to write about sheep, it's just because I happened to write about sheep. There is no deep significance.
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Artists are those who can evade the verbose.
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I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.
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With the advent of winter, her eyes seemed to take on a greater transparency, a transparency that lead nowhere. Occassionally, for no particular reason, Naoko would gaze into my eyes as if searching for something. Each time I was filled with odd sensations of lonliness and inadequecy.
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Nobody's easier to fool, than the person who is convinced that he is right.
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The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.
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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.
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My arm was not what she needed, but the arm of someone else. My warmth was not what she needed, but the warmth of someone else.
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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.
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You're walking through a field all by yourself one day in spring and this sweet little bear cub with velvet fur and shiny little eyes comes walking along. And he says to you, 'Hi, there, little lady. Want to tumble with me?' So you and the bear spend the whole day in each other's arms, tumbling down this clover-covered hill. Nice, huh?
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Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge,” Aomame said. “Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire’s budget deficits. It has no moral significance.
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I wonder what ants do on rainy days?
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...most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.
Haruki Murakami