
The readers and I are on the same ground. I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. There’s no such thing as perfect writing just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

Things in life don’t necessarily flow over the shortest possible route. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again.

I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. HARUKI MURAKAMI, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running In the world we live in, what we know and what we don’t know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. 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. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do. Memories are what warm you up from the inside. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting. Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. HARUKI MURAKAMI, Paris Review, summer 2004 I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen. When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. In truth, all sensation is already memory. The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, South of the Border, West of the Sun HARUKI MURAKAMI, Blind Willow, Sleeping WomanĮven castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while. I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves.
