Novelist as a Vocation

by Haruki Murakami

For writing a novel is in the end forging a link with people on other planets. For real!

At any rate, when at long last I finally graduated from university, I remember being relieved, thinking, “Great. Now I never have to go to school again.” It was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I’ve never felt any nostalgia about school, not even once (probably).

The reason I didn’t study hard was simple. It was boring. I just wasn’t interested.

Curiosity is everything.

The conclusion I came to was that the goal of English classes in Japanese high schools was not to get students to use actual, living English.

Japan’s educational system fundamentally fails to consider how to motivate each individual to improve their potential.

panoramic view. If you always see things from your own standpoint, the world shrinks.

IN ANY CASE, in the same way that you have to read a lot of books in order to write novels, to write about people you need to know a lot of them.

What I want to say is that in a certain sense, while the novelist is creating a novel, he is simultaneously being created by the novel as well.

My personality just wouldn’t allow me to let someone else run the shop.