Haruki Murakami Quotes

I always write about the things that haunt me, the questions I have.

How thin and insecure is that little beach of white sand we call consciousness. I've always known that in my writing it is the dark troubled sea of which I know nothing, save its presence, that carried me. I've always felt that creating was a fearless and a timid, a despairing and hopeful, launching out into that unknown.

I really just want to be a writer and a storyteller. But maybe pain is one of the things you have to feel in order to be creative.

I'm a writer and this is what I do no matter what name we put to it. Year by year, the world is turning into a darker and stranger place than any of us could want. This is the only thing I do that has potential to shine a little further than my immediate surroundings. For me, each story is a little candle held up to the dark of night, trying to illuminate the hope for a better world where we all respect and care for each other.

Imagination flourishes best in solitude.

I write in the mornings, in the bright daylight. But I get most of my good ideas after the sun has gone down and the dark is on the land.

Writing is like meditation or going into an ESP trance, or prayer. Like dreaming. You are tapping into your unconscious. To be fully conscious and alert, with life banging and popping and cuckooing all around, you are not going to find your way to your subconscious, which is a place of complete submission.

The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.

Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.

Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of night.

One of the things meditation gives you is creativity because creativity really comes from the subconscious brain - intuition, imagination - so it's not like you can go there and say, I'm going to go be creative now. Maybe you can, but the real way you get creativity is, you know, you're taking a hot shower and great ideas come to you from the subconscious. Essentially, meditation opens a pipeline between the conscious and the subconscious.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.

Of course, I had a paradigm of a certain city in my head when I wrote these stories, a city that inspired my imagination, but it was only inspiration.

I found that I could not climb my way up to God in a blaze of doing and performing. Rather, I had to descend into the depths of myself and find God there in the darkness of troubled waters.

The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

If you work on your creativity, you deepen your spirituality. And if you work on your spirituality, you deepen your creativity.

All fiction comes from a little bit of reality, otherwise it would have no relevance. The fun is in innovation, take something real like this fair, and make it something larger than life.

Imagination is a great thing in long dull hours, but it's a real curse in a dark alley.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane began with a friend giving me a rabbit doll - forgive me, Edward, for using that word; he doesn't like "doll" - for Christmas. I said, "Oh, he's lovely, what's his name?" And she said, "Edward." And a few days after I received the rabbit, who was dressed very handsomely in Edwardian kind of clothes, I saw him stripped of his finery and face down on the bottom of the ocean floor. Why? I don't know. But that's where his story began in my head.

I try to think of the songs as little movies. They're always pretty visual to me. I can always sort of see them. I don't always know what the end result is going to be, and I don't know exactly what it's going to sound like, but I can kinda see them.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.

No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write, find out wether it spreading out its root in the deepest places of your heart...Delve into yourself for a deep answer