Novelist as a Vocation

by Haruki Murakami

For the most part, novelists are trying to convert something present in their consciousness into a story. Yet there is an inevitable gap between the preexisting original and the new shape it is spawning.

Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles.

One day, however, it hit me that I was pushing thirty. What I thought of as my youth was coming to a close. I remember how weird that feeling was. “So this is how it is,” I thought. “Time just slips away.”