Haruki Murakami Quotes

It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there's an email, most of the time there's a letter, someone wants something of you.

When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.

I was always surrounded by expectation from the very first race I ran as a 5-year-old.

The word 'potential' used to hang over me like a cloud.

I just feel like I have a lot to prove.

It's a bit of a headache being a perfectionist. You're never satisfied.

The moment I feel pressure to read a book, I instinctively rebel against it - which is probably one reason I didn't last long in college.

I found myself trying to be all things to all people. I felt a tremendous sense of responsibility and the pressure of expectation.

I feel like people expect a lot from me.

A library is many things. It's a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It's a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books. If you want to find out about something, the information is in the reference books---the dictionaries, the encyclopedias, the atlases. If you like to be told a story, the library is the place to go.

I tended to give a book a chance and another chance and another, sometimes seeing it all the way to the end, still hoping for for it turn out different. Maybe I was confused about what you owed a book. What you owed people, for that matter, real or fictional.

I don't think it is pressure but I am aware sometimes, especially on this new album, that people were going to really pay attention.

You'd have to be kind of a bonehead not to feel pressure.

I want to hold onto this funny thing. God, it's gotten big on me. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why. I feel like I'm putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I'm saving a lot of things, and I don't know what. I might even start reading books.

There is so much pressure on me to surfboard now

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon ruined for him already.

My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.

I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.

The whole damned country was depending on me.

One must have some sort of occupation nowadays. If I hadn't my debts I shouldn't have anything to think about.

A lot of people are scared. It's the way you're raised. The way you've been told your whole life, that you've got to do this and that. Get a job, go to school. So, a lot of people are scared to just do what they really want. They're worried about what people will think and stuff like that. It's just fear.

When I was growing up, books took me away from my life to a solitary place that didn't feel lonely. They celebrated the outcasts, people who sat on the margins of society contemplating their interiors. . . Books were my cure for a romanticized unhappiness, for the anxiety of impending adulthood. They were all mine, private islands with secret passwords only the worthy could utter.

Some of the best auditions I've ever had have been when my agent called and said, "They want you 20 minutes ago, in an office in Century City, to see you for something." It's actually sometimes a really good thing. I don't have time to second-guess myself, I don't have time to overthink things, and I don't have time to get bogged down in stuff. I'm not sitting there thinking for a week and a half, before I'm supposed to go in front of a network president to do something. That just gives you time to be nervous.

I am a person who always feels like I am not doing the right thing because there's always so many things that need to get done.

New Year's Eve always terrifies me.