But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Let me say something about the third girl I slept with. It’s hard enough to talk about someone who’s dead; harder still to talk about someone who died young. That’s because having died, she’s forever young. Whereas we who survive grow older year by year, month by month, day by day. Sometimes I swear I can even feel myself aging by the hour. And the frightening thing is it’s true.
Haruki Murakami, Hear the Wind Sing
I think video games are closer to fiction than anything else these days. I don’t like playing video games myself, but I feel the similarity. Sometimes while I’m writing I feel I’m the designer of a video game, and at the same time, a player. I made up the program, and now I’m in the middle of it; the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. It’s a kind of detachment. A feeling of a split.
Haruki Murakami

Strange Islands ... Silent Music: Haruki Murakami on Contemporary Fiction and the Faking of Reality

crashinglybeautiful:

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task. In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it’s the real thing. But I don’t. I’m not pretending it’s the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it’s a commitment, it’s a true relationship. That’s what I want to write about.

from jamreilly via:   Paris Review: Interview with Haruki Murakami

Source: jamreilly

Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami

  • Sheep Man: Like we said, we'll do what we can. Try to reconnect you, to what you want. But we can't do it alone. You gotta work too. Sitting's not gonna do it, thinking's not gonna do it.
  • Narrator: So what do I have to do?
  • Sheep Man: Dance. You gotta dance. As long as the music plays. You gotta dance. Don't even think why. Start to think, your feet stop. Your feet stop, we get stuck. We get stuck, you're stuck. So don't pay any mind, no matter how dumb. You gotta keep the step. You gotta limber up. You gotta loosen what you bolted down. You gotta use all you got. We know you're tired, tired and scared. Happens to everyone, ok? Just don't let your feet stop.