"It seemed to him that her room was the room of fullness, the room of beautiful and allowable yearning, while his was the room of emptiness and sterile prohibition. He turned on CNN, for the blare of it, and watched a report on the latest carnage in Iraq while he undressed for a lonely shower."
"A day or two after the trip Scott brought his book over. It had a garish dust jacket and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and slippery look of it. It looked the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction. Scott told me not to be put off by it, that it had to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important in the story. He said he had liked the jacket and now he didn’t like it. I took it off to read the book."
"Memory is like fiction; or else it’s fiction that’s like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemed a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn’t there anymore. You’re left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another. Warm with life, hopelessly unstable."
— Haruki Murakami, “The Last Lawn of the Afternoon,” The Elephant Vanishes
"‘Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers,’ I said, with a chuckle.
‘I have no talent.’
‘Then what do you want to do?’
He gave me his radiant, fascinating smile.
‘Loaf,’ he said."
"Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again."
"When these accountants from these companies call me and tell me they are raising their prices on me again, I look forward to the day when they will have nothing to eat. That will be some kind of day. And you know what I’ll say at that point? I’ll say, ‘Eat your computer. Eat it. Eat it right now.’” - Thanasis Frentzo"
"The Italians asked me if I thought President Wilson would declare war on Turkey. I said that was doubtful. Turkey, I said, was our national bird but the joke translated so badly and they were so puzzled and suspicious that I said yes, we would probably declare war on Turkey."
