Haruki Murakami Quotes

No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

We're always just telling stories, and stories are always just approximations of the truth. It's never the truth exactly.

We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense.

Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

Memory is your image of perfection.

Memory is imagination pinned down.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

I never take pictures. Skies are much larger in reminiscences and my friends are much better-looking. Photos crop reality into little squares; instead, I have very good binoculars.

Truth is a matter of the imagination.

Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Learn to see things as they really are, not as we imagine they are.

I think truth is weirder than fiction.

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

In polling, truth is what people perceive.

One's memories aren't what actually happened - they're very subjective. You can always make it much better, right?

Truth I have no trouble with, it's the facts I get all screwed up.

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

If this book has made any point clear, I hope it's that things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.