Haruki Murakami

I stare at her chest. As she breathes, the rounded peaks move up and down like the swell of waves, somehow reminding me of rain falling softly on a broad stretch of sea. I'm the lonely voyager standing on deck, and she's the sea. The sky is a blanket of gray, merging with the gray sea off on the horizon. It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky. Between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.

I was thirty-seven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport.

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.

For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting.

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love.

Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life

Writing talent is similar to the art of chatting up a girl. You can improve to a certain degree through practice, but basically you are either born with it or you aren't.

If you do anything out of the ordinary, you can be sure someone, somewhere, will get upset.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

I happen to like the strange ones. People who look normal and leads normal lives - they're the ones you have to watch out for.

There's an essential order you have to follow in everything. It's a way of showing respect, following everything in the correct order.

Time flows in a strange way on Sundays.

Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.

It's just like sex; when [a book is] finished, it's finished.

There has to be pain. That's the rule.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don't know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying - please let me live until I am finished.

Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

Each individual has their own unique color, which shines faintly around the contours of their body. Like a halo. Or a backlight. I'm able to see those colors clearly.