"Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it."
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Quote collection
Haruki Murakami quotes (page 52 of 55)
1.1K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You could be anybody when you're writing. That's the reason that I'm writing: to be anybody. You can put your feet in various shoes and experience anything."
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"The house kept its own time, like the old-fashioned grandfather clock in the living room. People who happened by raised the weights, and as long as the weights were wound, the clock continued ticking away. But with people gone and the weights unattended, whole chunks of time were left to collect in deposits of faded life on the floor."
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"Of course you got rights, the law's on your side, but sometimes the law takes a long time to kick in and so it gets put in the hands of us poor suckers on duty. You get my drift?"
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"Most of what I know about writing I've learned through running every day."
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"Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity."
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"It is very simple, actually. It is because you and Tengo were so powerfully drawn to each other."
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"I'm not human. I'm a piece of machinery. I don't need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead."
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"What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability."
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"I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt but I was wrong."
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"Everything. Things you lost. Things you’re gonna lose. Everything. Here’s where it all ties together."
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"It seems to me that very sad things always contain an element of the comical"
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"I think certain types of processes don’t allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform—or perhaps distort—yourself through that persistent repetition, and make that process a part of your own personality."
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"Whenever I get into something, I shut out everything else."
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"I’ve had that kind of experience myself: I’m looking at a map and I see someplace that makes me think, ‘I absolutely have to go to this place, no matter what’. And most of the time, for some reason, the place is far away and hard to get to. I feel this overwhelming desire to know what kind of scenery the place has, or what people are doing there. It’s like measles - you can’t show other people exactly where the passion comes from. It’s curiosity in the purest sense. An inexplicable inspiration."
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"Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers-passageways- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them."
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"I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I?"
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"I have these realistic dreams and snap wide awake in the middle of the night. And for a while I can't work out what's real and what isn't... That kind of feeling. Do you have any idea what I'm saying?"
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"Sometimes when I'm with you, I remember things I lost when I was your age. Like I remember the sound of the rain and the smell of the wind."
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"Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it's shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that's the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven't found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it's probably correct."
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