Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Exhaustion pays no mind to age or beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

Sometimes you're just the sweetest thing. Like Christmas, summer vacation, and a brand-new puppy rolled into one.

As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around.

There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell.

Today things are different. The darkness in the outside world has vanished, but the darkness in our hearts remains, virtually unchanged. Just like an iceberg, what we label the ego or consciousness is, for the most part, sunk in darkness. And that estrangement sometimes creates a deep contradiction or confusion within us.

No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.

I wasn't particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don't have to die the next.

There are lots of things we never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter how much experience we accumulate.

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.

Results aside, the ability to have complete faith in another human being is one of the finest qualities a person can possess.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they'll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same.

Irrepressible curiosity vied with an instinctive fear.

Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss.

It is sometimes necessary for each person. Fill up with delicious food, get drunk, sing loudly and chat frivolously.

It's good when food tastes good, it's kind of like proof you're alive.

I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.

Either I'm funny or the world's funny. I don't know which. The bottle and lid don't fit. It could be the bottle's fault or the lid's fault. In either case, there's no denying that the fit is bad.

Most near-future fictions are boring. It's always dark and always raining, and people are so unhappy.

Human love is a fragile creation, and sometimes the smallest thing - the wrong choice of words or a single clumsy gesture - can make love shatter, stall or fade away.

There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person's heart.