Top 500 Haruki Murakami Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Creative people have to be fundamentally egoistic. This may sound pompous, but it happens to be the truth. People who live their lives watching what goes on around them, trying not to make waves, and looking for the easy compromise are not going to be able to do creative work, whatever their field.”

— Haruki Murakami

352. “In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.”

— Haruki Murakami

353. “No war is won or lost until the final battle is over.”

— Haruki Murakami

354. “Writers have to keep on writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves.”

— Haruki Murakami

355. “I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Book Quotes

356. “To be able to talk to your heart’s content about a book you like with someone who feels the same way about it is one of the greatest joys that life can offer.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Book Quotes

357. “Fate seems to be taking me in some even stranger directions.”

— Haruki Murakami

358. “I didn’t have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it’s fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Book Quotes

359. “I began running on an everyday basis after I became a writer. As being a writer requires sitting at a desk for hours a day, without getting some exercise you’d quickly get out of shape and gain weight, I figured.”

— Haruki Murakami

360. “Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep.”

— Haruki Murakami

361. “Writing talent is similar to the art of chatting up a girl. You can improve to a certain degree through practice, but basically you are either born with it or you aren’t.”

— Haruki Murakami

362. “It’s not me but the world that’s deranged.”

— Haruki Murakami

363. “When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.”

— Haruki Murakami

364. “I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I’m alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Real Quotes, Reading Quotes

365. “I have to somehow get connected to reality again, he thought, or else I won’t be me anymore. I’ll become a man who doesn’t exist.”

— Haruki Murakami

366. “I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I am much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That’s just the kind of person I am. I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox.”

— Haruki Murakami

367. “This is pretty obvious, but until things happen, they haven’t happened. And often things aren’t what they seem.”

— Haruki Murakami

368. “I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Book Quotes

369. “You can have tons of talent, but it won’t necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, through, you’ll never go hungry.”

— Haruki Murakami

370. “Once thing goes wrong, then the whole house of cards collapses. And there’s no way you can extricate yourself. Until someone comes along to drag you out.”

— Haruki Murakami

371. “No matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.”

— Haruki Murakami

372. “Our life here was just a momentary illusion, and someday reality would yank us back to the world we came from.”

— Haruki Murakami

373. “Give yourself five minutes to consider how you can turn a miserable situation to your benefit and that light bulb is going to click on.”

— Haruki Murakami

374. “Accurate knowledge does not improve people’s lives. The objective does not necessarily surpass the subjective, you know. Reality does not necessarily extinguish fantasy... There are channels through which reality can become unreal, or unreality can enter the realm of the real. If we desire it that strongly. Deep in our heart. But that didn’t mean we were free. It might demonstrate quite the opposite.”

— Haruki Murakami

375. “You can see a person’s whole life in the cancer they get.”

— Haruki Murakami

376. “My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.”

— Haruki Murakami

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377. “Because brains packed with knowledge are yummy, that’s why. They’re nice and creamy. And sort of grainy at the same time.”

— Haruki Murakami

378. “The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend.”

— Haruki Murakami

379. “When you fall in love, the natural thing to do is give yourself to it.”

— Haruki Murakami

380. “What I’d like to be is a unique writer who’s different from everybody else. I want to be a writer who tells stories unlike other writers’.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

381. “It is the same with anything – you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can’t learn it from a book.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Book Quotes

382. “Irrepressible curiosity vied with an instinctive fear.”

— Haruki Murakami

383. “It’s like I’d been born with a blind spot, and was always missing something. And what I missed was always the most important thing of all.”

— Haruki Murakami

384. “We’re all wrong, every one of us.”

— Haruki Murakami

385. “Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Real Quotes

386. “She gave me this look – she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around.”

— Haruki Murakami

387. “Once she was out of the car and gone, my world was suddenly hollow and meaningless.”

— Haruki Murakami

388. “Reality’s just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. All you have to do is open a newspaper on any given day to weigh the good news versus the bad news, and you’ll see what I mean.”

— Haruki Murakami

389. “Maybe so, but I’m not just looking up at the sky and waiting for the fruit to drop. In my own way, I’m working hard. I’m working ten times harder than you are.”

— Haruki Murakami

390. “If talent’s the foundation you rely on, and yet it’s so unreliable that you have no idea what’s going to happen to it the next minute, what meaning does it have?”

— Haruki Murakami

391. “When I should have felt real pain, I stifled it. I didn’t want to take it on, so I avoided facing up to it. Which is why my heart is so empty now.”

— Haruki Murakami

392. “I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Book Quotes

393. “I don’t want our relationship to end like this. You’re one of the very few friends I have, and it hurts not being able to see you. When am I going to be able to talk to you? I want you to tell me that much, at least.”

— Haruki Murakami

394. “I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up; it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself.”

— Haruki Murakami

395. “Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.”

— Haruki Murakami

396. “With luck, it might even snow for us.”

— Haruki Murakami

397. “It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.”

— Haruki Murakami

398. “Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”

— Haruki Murakami

399. “Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”

— Haruki Murakami

400. “That’s what we all do: endlessly take the long way around.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Quotes About Stories