Haruki Murakami Quotes

I went to public school for like, one day. I don't get it. Everybody tries to be exactly the same. I think being an outsider is a good thing.

I didn't want to wear a checked shirt and grow a mustache - that's what you had to do, and everyone did.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

The nail that sticks out gets knocked down.

I grew up in a small town where everyone wanted to be the same or look the same and was afraid to be different.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

While children are struggling to be unique, the world around them is trying all means to make them look like everybody else.

The reason most people don't express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, It's what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them.

I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.

Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

It isn't till now, in the American Century, as we have recklessly dubbed it, that tribal pressures toward conformity have been brought to bear so ruthlessly upon men and women seeking to work creatively.

I'm not a blender. I don't like people who blend into society.

I wasn't like the rest of the kids. I was an artist. Living in a black society, when you're raised around a bunch of boys who plays sports and chase girls, there's this perception of masculinity that's super hard to fit into. I wasn't the stereotype of that like a lot of my peers were.

People don't want to be diverse, or they're scared to be diverse. People just dress a certain way to fit in but sometimes being outside of the box is the cool thing to do.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

At every point I am besieged by people who would like me to conform to some social norm of whatever sort of social group they expect me to be a part of. I never have any identification with these social groups.

I've always balked at anything that feels like a clique, even if it's not always in my best interest to do so. I like each individual, fedora-wearing hipster - it's just the greater gestalt that rubs me the wrong way.

I don't like to be different; I would like to be the same.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

I don't want to live up to how people expect me to be.

To be with the others, you have to have your hair short and wear ties. So we're trying to make a third world happen, you know what I mean?

Anyone who draws attention to himself as an individual, is viewed with suspicion. We acquired this tendency, of course, from America, and we must resist it: levelling, and imitation of what others are already doing.

I've seen a lot of good things and a lot of the bad of what Hollywood can bring. At the end of the day, I've found that when you try and fit in, that's a way to go crazy; you kind of lose yourself. I'm sometimes the different one at the table, but I don't care.

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

I try to be as normal as I can.