Quotes from Haruki Murakami

I get irritated, I get upset. Especially when I'm in a hurry. But I see it all as part of our training. To get irritated is to lose our way in life.

I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

Painful is the stress when one cannot reproduce or convey vividly to others, however hard he tries, what he's experienced so intensely.

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.

Life is like a box of cookies.

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all.

You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.

Everything in life is a metaphor.

Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.

Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life.

Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It's like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.

The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.

Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it'd lose even its imperfection.

What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.

What we needed were not words and promises but a steady accumulation of small realities.

Is this what it means to go back to square one? Most likely. He had nothing left to lose, other than his life.

I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.

Another person's life is that person's life. You can't take responsibility.

I may be the type who manages to grab all the pointless things in life but lets the really important things slip away.