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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.

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
Always
Chamber
Like
Background
Backgrounds
Lows
Usually
Imagination
Stimulates
Music
Baroque
Writing
Bach

More quotes by Haruki Murakami

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People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.
Haruki Murakami
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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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I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is I’m totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free? I don’t know, and I give up thinking about it.
Haruki Murakami
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Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.
Haruki Murakami
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Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free?
Haruki Murakami
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Far away, I could hear them lapping up my brains. Like Macbeth's witches, the three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick my consciousness flickered like a flame and faded away.
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They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?
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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.
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What matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely. When you do that, it is always the first time and the last.
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Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?
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I'll never see them again. I know that. And they know that. And knowing this, we say farewell.
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A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.
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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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Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about is this: That’s life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what’s going on.
Haruki Murakami
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In dreams begins responsiblities.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
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I'm all alone, but I'm not lonely.
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But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abyss of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it.
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Of course you got rights, the law's on your side, but sometimes the law takes a long time to kick in and so it gets put in the hands of us poor suckers on duty. You get my drift?
Haruki Murakami
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Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to eachother, their spreading ripples intermingling.
Haruki Murakami