Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money canโt buy.
Haruki MurakamiMy only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely lifeโฆ Not that I knew what I wanted in life - I didnโt. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didnโt write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. Thatโs why I didnโt study literature
Haruki MurakamiWhy do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
Haruki MurakamiAnd as we live our lives we discover - drawing toward us the thin threads attached to each - what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding on to them.
Haruki MurakamiIโm free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I canโt really understand what it means. All I know is Iโm totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer whoโs lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free? I donโt know, and I give up thinking about it.
Haruki MurakamiI think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.
Haruki Murakami