Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work.

Nobody's going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can't always be in the fast lane.

Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I'm talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.

This is no honky-tonk parade. 1Q84 is the real world, where a cut draws real blood, where pain is real pain and fear is real fear. The moon in the sky is no paper moon.

Young people these days don't trust anything at all. They want to be free.

Nakata's empty inside... Do you know what it means to be completely empty? Being empty is like a vacant house. An unlocked, vacant house. Anybody can come in, anytime they want. That's what scares me the most

Kafka is one of my very favorite writers. Kafka's fictional world is already so complete that trying to follow in his steps is not just pointless, but quite risky, too. What I see myself doing, rather, is writing novels where, in my own way, I dismantle the fictional world of Kafka that itself dismantled the existing novelistic system.