Haruki Murakami Quotes

I have tasted freedom. I will not give up that which I have tasted.

Whenever somebody tells me they want me to stop singing, I'm gone.

If I lose, I lose. I'll do it on my terms.

Stand up for yourself and fight for your right to be the artist that you want to be. There's plenty of pressure from outside; people tell you how to dress and how to sing or what to sing, but I always felt like if I'm going to fail or succeed, I want to do it on my own terms.

I am doing what I'm doing, and if you don't like it, don't go see it.

I don't see why I should bow my head when I could hold it high, or place it in the hands of my enemies when I can defeat them.

Do you think God can be trusted? Or do yo think you need to take things into your own hands?

I think that men think they need their man caves. They don't really do. They think they want them, and then the second they do get them and they have alone time and time away from the girl, and the girl is really cool with giving them alone time, then that's when they, or at least I, start to think, "So, why are you so cool with me being alone? What's wrong with me that you don't want to be with me every second."

Become goddesses of disobedience.

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science. Great achievement is assured, however, of subsequent recognition and grateful acceptance by public opinion, which in due course will make it one of its own prejudices

I've discovered that the more freedom I have to be creative, the more creative I become.

All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.

He kissed back, all the pages spread out around us like riddles waiting to be solved. Let them wait. Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worse. I'll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I'd sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins.

A brave man's hand can speak for itself, it does not even need a woman's love to hear its music.

I'm not going to wait on anybody to put out music or a visual. Everything I will do is on my own. I'm not waiting on anyone.

I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.

I wondered if parents had an easier time with the secrets their children kept than children did with the secrets of their parents. A parent's secrets seemed like some sort of betrayal, where my own just seemed like a fact of life and growing up and away. I was supposed to be independent, but he was supposed to be available. Him having his own life seemed selfish, where me having my own was the right order of things.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can't live somebody else's life for them. They have to make their own choices, and sometimes all we can do is learn to live with them.

The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.

I have no plans to love you," said Coraline. "No matter what. You can't make me love you.

You can do right or you can do what you are told. And the prize of the victory will belong to the bold.

Never ask for approval in your work. Life is your own, inspiration is your own, you create alone, and the results are your own - and that's good enough.

I really wasn't very much of a rebel. I'm seen by people now as more of a rebel which is strange. I don't like doing what people tell me to do. I don't deliberately rebel against them.

I have no fear; I have nothing to lose. I'd rather burn out than fade away, and I would rather go out in a blaze of glory on my own terms than let anybody dictate anything to me in my career. I had the chance to wrestle The Undertaker [on Smackdown in 2013], and one thing I took away from it was that he looked me in the eye and said, 'Trust your instincts because you've got great instincts.'

Surely to root politics out of art is a highly necessary undertaking: for the freedom of art, like that of science, depends entirely upon its objectivity and non-practical, non-partisan passion.