Haruki Murakami Quotes

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

I won't write a book. I haven't got a magnum opus in me.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

I'm constantly creating and writing.

When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.

The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

To write is, indeed, no unpleasing employment, when one sentiment readily produces another, and both ideas and expressions present themselves at the first summons; but such happiness, the greatest genius does not always obtain; and common writers know it only to such a degree, as to credit its possibility. Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

One of the easiest things in the world is not to write... If it were easy, everyone would do it.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song.

Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore

Just start writing and you'll find what you want to say.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible.

Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.

To the composition of novels and romances, nothing is necessary but paper, pens, and ink, with the manual capacity of using them.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.