Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami

"Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you--you should control them."
150 Quotes
"Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you--you should control them."
Haruki Murakami Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories
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"In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality."
Haruki Murakami Sputnik Sweetheart
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"The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time."
Haruki Murakami Sputnik Sweetheart
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"With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating."
Haruki Murakami Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
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"I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do."
Haruki Murakami Sputnik Sweetheart
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"“I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.”"
Haruki Murakami After Dark
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"People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring."
Haruki Murakami Kafka on the Shore
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"The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues...[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings."
Haruki Murakami Kafka on the Shore
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"“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”"
Haruki Murakami The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
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"Among the many values in life, I appreciate freedom most."
Haruki Murakami
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"I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching."
Haruki Murakami
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"Young people these days don't trust anything at all. They want to be free."
Haruki Murakami
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"I've run the Boston Marathon 6 times before. I think the best aspects of the marathon are the beautiful changes of the scenery along the route and the warmth of the people's support. I feel happier every time I enter this marathon."
Haruki Murakami
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"I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run."
Haruki Murakami
"You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you."
Haruki Murakami
"I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else."
Haruki Murakami
"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."
Haruki Murakami
"Team sports aren't my thing. I find it easier to pick something up if I can do it at my own speed. And you don't need a partner to go running, you don't need a particular place, like in tennis, just a pair of trainers."
Haruki Murakami
"My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it."
Haruki Murakami
"In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics' praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you've set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can't fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike."
Haruki Murakami
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