Haruki Murakami Quotes

Not understanding anything is terrible, because I communicate very much in my real life.

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Listen to all the conversations of our world, between nations as well as between individuals. They are, for the most part, dialogues of the deaf.

In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.

I actually don't understand a word Paula's saying anymore. It's like a new language.

Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.

One never discusses anything with anybody who can understand one discusses things with people who cannot understand.

Two nations divided by a common language.

It hurts a lot when you cannot really comprehend what a person is saying in a meeting, or you don't even understand what you're reading in your contract.

I am a candid interview and I have a dark and dry sense of humor - a very Canadian sense of humor and I am only learning now stupidly that you can't read tongue. When I say something funny in a newspaper and I meant it to be funny, it doesn't read that way.

I feel sometimes that I'm in a constant state of being lost in translation, and I guess that why I write songs.

I don't know if my sense of humor goes over Americans' heads.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

There is always that age-old thing about England and America being divided by a common language. You think that because we speak English and you speak English that you're bound to understand and like everything that we do. And of course you don't.

Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy.

Man is used to the fact that there are languages which he does not at first understand and which must be learned, but because art is primarily visual he expects that he should get the message immediately and is apt to be affronted if he doesn't.

More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.

Even when well translated. can we really understand what other cultures are talking about?

What Thucydides said of the Greeks at the time of the Peleponnesian War applies to us at present [1860]. The Greeks did not understand each other any longer, though they spoke the same language; words received a different meaning in different parts.

One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, 'Wrong!'

Sometimes it can be difficult when you're talking to a journo after the game, saying, 'Yeah mate, I was on the burst.' And then the translator is trying to translate that into Japanese, and apparently there is no actual translation.

I hate when I see someone who speaks English speaking to someone who speaks a different language, and they're screaming as if going louder is going to help the other person understand.

If there is an interpreter sitting between two friends, he may be able to translate the words but not the feelings with which I say something.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

Most of our life is miscommunication, and when you add a language barrier to it, it just becomes total mayhem and confusion... It just adds to it with all of the cultural differences. It could be an American family meeting another American family and you could still have a total clash. With family, it's like visiting another planet.