Haruki Murakami Quotes

A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

I love the creative process. That's always been the closest thing to my heart, creating something.

When I think about how I want to reach an audience, I just wanted to make pieces that were inspired by something that gave me so much pleasure.

Making art, good art, is always a struggle. It can make you happy when you pull it off. There's no better feeling. It's beauteous. But it's always about hard work and inspiration and sweat and good ideas.

I like all kinds of stories, and I usually work on several stories at once. When I run out of gas on one, I start work on the other.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

The movie business is not something that can come from the brain. It really comes from the soul and the heart.

'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.

There are so many ideas that you just come up with on a day-to-day basis when you're a writer that it's very difficult to want to go back to an old fling, so to speak.

I try to make films that I find exciting. It makes me want to get out of bed at five in the morning, have my make-up done and play for the rest of the day.

Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.

My favorite on screen moments are when you are really there and you know you're creating something. That's so exciting... it's why you come to work.

I really feel like you shouldn't make a movie as a kind of exercise. You have to be all the way in.

I've always loved both writing and songwriting. The journey is fascinating to me.

It took me a good two-and-a-half to three years to write 'Dhobi Ghat' and more importantly be satisfied with it.

My struggle over the years has constantly been, it only takes 10 minutes, or an average shower, to come up with a mini-series or two, but it takes a year to draw them. So for me, it's been just trying to find a way to get all these ideas and all these incidents on paper.

I get writer's block all the time. The only way I can write what I consider to be good lyrics is to put myself through the mill.

Acting is probably what I'm best at, but there are certain stories kind of rattling around in my head that I like the idea of developing over time.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.