Haruki Murakami Quotes

A good director's not sure when he gets on the set what he's going to do.

I think the philosophy will continue to be what it always was; which was, let's keep throwing a bunch of things at the wall, and see what sticks.

Regulations are all very well for drill, but in the hour of danger they are no more use. You have to learn to think.

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

You can't second-guess baseball. You can't second-guess yourself.

Do I have a long-term plan? Kind of. I have a general direction, I think. But it's funny what comes down the pike.

I'm not that in control of myself that I could be specific about exactly the way I'm doing everything as it happens. I'm just trying my best.

I've never been a planner. I didn't know I was going to run for the State House. I didn't know I was going to run for governor. I don't know what's next, and I love not thinking about it because the doors open at a certain time.

In my work, I have never had any use for anything that I have known in advance.

When I was younger, I talked to the adults around me that I respected most about how they got where they were, and none of them plotted a course they could have predicted, so it seemed a waste of time to plan too long-term. Since then, I've always gone on my instincts.

The whole thing about doing TV is that you never know what's going to happen. You just have to go with it and go with the flow.

As much as I long for a sort of security and consistency sometimes, I do enjoy sort of being busted around. I really don't know what's happening sometimes next week, let alone this year.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

I'm always surprised at what I actually end up doing because I don't have a strategy or a game plan, especially now that I'm making my own choices.

I truly don't have any formula for the choices I make.

You know, the whole philosophy of ad hoc combinations has its strengths and its weaknesses.

A president, like a college freshman, can't know in advance which questions he'll have to answer or what topics he'll have to master. He has to be flexible, supple, and responsive. He has to be comfortable with multiple-choice.

I used to think there was a scientific way to do things. Like a proper way to answer a question or that kind of stuff. It's like, there's not! There's not a method, there's not a science to it.

I don't plan a career. That doesn't work for me. I just have to go with my gut.

I love to be in the position of not knowing what I'm gonna do, but having rehearsed all of those so when something happens with the others actors I go with whatever that is I'm getting.

The whole thing about the way I approach work is to be surprised by an opportunity when it comes up. So I have no idea what I will be doing next, and I kind of like that.

As an idea occurs to me, I'll either follow it or not, but I'm more instinctive than master-planner about stuff.

There is no facet of my professional life that doesn't require or request improvisation.

I don't seem to have ever had a plan, but I have always been quite good at walking through doors when they are opened. I am never any good at anticipating what will happen next, but I always go for it when it does.

I'm just kind of taking whatever life gives me and hoping that I make the right decision.