Haruki Murakami Quotes

If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That's what I've done.

Catch me on a good day, I think half of my books aren't too bad. Catch me on a bad day, I think I've never written a good line.

I try very hard to write the best book I possibly can, every time.

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

I write a good amount. I've been gathering up a backlog of stuff and maybe I'll do something with it someday, but I don't want to talk about it just yet because that would jinx it.

I will not write a lame follow-up. It could take me 20 years. But I will never turn in a book that I'm not happy with.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

I love it when I start a book that is so good that all I want to do is get back to my own writing, in a competitive way.

You have to go where the good writing is.

When I write a book, I'm making it the best book I can.

Reading while I'm writing ideally inspires my competitive side. When I read great writers, I want to be a better writer.

I see the author as the person who has written; the writer, the one involved in the process of writing. And they're not necessarily friends. The writer is the one I want to reinforce; the author would just feed on the reviews - so I'm in favour of starving him.

I always want to make sure the book I'm writing is the best book I can deliver.

It is important for poets and writers today to know their shortcomings, and be able to edit their own work as well as reject them if they are not up to their standards.

I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve.

I've sat down and written with a more or less supportable or insupportable idea or thing to say, and it ends. When it's not 200 pages, people want to call it a story. I guess they're entitled to do that. In my view, if it were a supportable idea, it would have gone 200 pages, and it didn't.

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.

My son had toyed with the idea of writing and trying to write a little bit, so that kind of gave me the bug to write also.

I've always wanted to be a writer. Ever since I learned to read, I've wanted to share stories with others the way my favorite writers shared their stories with me.

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.

All my friends who wanted to write had got nowhere trying to write the great European novel. So I deliberately steered clear of that and set out to write something story-led.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.