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The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.

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
Like
Eye
Living
Power
Anything
Concentrate
Without
Concentration
Important
Opening
Thing
Seeing
Would
Eyes

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I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.
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Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work.
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You couldn’t begin to imagine who I am, where I’m going, or what I’m about to do, All of you are trapped here. You can’t go anywhere, forward or back. But I’m not like you. I have work to do. I have a mission to accomplish. And so, with your permission, I shall move ahead.
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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.
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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.
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I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream - I was surprised to find it happening.
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A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.
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I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.
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This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there.
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It was a strange feeling, like touching a void.
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If she did experience sex-or something close to it-in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.
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For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.
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That's wrong, she declared. Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it? But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.
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Listening to the music while stretching her body close to its limit, she was able to attain a mysterious calm. She was simultaneously the torturer and the tortured, the forcer and the forced. This sense of inner-directed self-sufficiency was what she wanted most of all. It gave her deep solace.
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Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.
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The good thing about writing book is that you can dream while you are awake.
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I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.
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Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.
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If you do anything out of the ordinary, you can be sure someone, somewhere, will get upset.
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You could be anybody when you're writing. That's the reason that I'm writing: to be anybody. You can put your feet in various shoes and experience anything.
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