Quotes About Murakami

But it speaks for an inner world— and again this is evident in Murakami— that sits in a different dimension from the smooth-running, flawlessly attentive, and all but anonymous machine that keeps public order moving forward so efficiently in Japan.

A lot of the surreal writing that I love is really dreamlike. Like Murakami. He uses the real world, and it's pretty recognizable, but its populated by these strange visitors, or it has these underground spaces. I was always really compelled by that.

I don't want to express my opinion about actual politics, because if I do, I have to be responsible for my decision.

That soft but penetrating voice that caressed your ears and climbed through your brain like a vine.

The next morning, I worked out at Murakami's dojo in Asakusa. When I arrived, the men who were already training paused and gave me a low collective bow—a sign of their respect for the way I had dispatched Adonis. After that, I was treated in a dozen subtle ways with deference that bordered on awe. Even Washio, older than I and with a much longer and deeper association with the dojo, was using different verb forms to indicate that he now considered me his superior.

The Nigerians were gauntleting the entranceway. They bowed obsequiously low for Murakami and breathed "Irasshaimase" in unison. The one on the right spoke into his lapel mike. We walked down the steps. The ruddy-faced man I had seen there last time looked up. He saw Murakami and swallowed.

The waitress came and put the drinks on the table. Murakami drained his in a single draught. Yukiko followed suit. "Ii yo," Murakami growled. Good. Yukiko set her glass down with practiced delicacy. Murakami looked at her. She returned the look, something almost theatrically nonchalant in her expression. The look went on for a long moment. Then he grinned and grabbed her hand.

I've been immersed in manga since I was a kid. I grew up with this culture.

I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.

People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.

Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.

That was the rule. Break one of my rules once, and I'm bound to break many more.

If I'm going to merely ramble, maybe I should just snuggle under the warm covers, think of Miu, and play with myself.

The Boss is an honorable man. After the Lord, the most godly person I've ever met. You've met God? Certainly. I telephone Him every night.

In the darkness, I returned to that small world of hers.

To tell you the truth, sleepless nights are as unusual for me as sumo wrestlers who look good in berets.

That is dreamreading. As the birds leave south or north in their season, the Dreamreader has dreams to read.

Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

one of the stated rules of the game for Murakami, who declared (ostensibly through Nietzsche) that "one cannot understand the gloom of the depths of night in the light of day.

Murakami played with the formulas of mass literature—what is elsewhere termed formulaic fiction—but at the last minute subverted the expectations of those formulas and left the reader wondering what had just happened. This to some degree accounted for the peculiar sense of simultaneous thrill and discouragement one often felt at the end of some of these texts.