Literary Birthday – 19 February – Ryū Murakami

Ryū Murakami Quotes

1. Everybody wants to talk about themselves, and everybody wants to hear everybody else’s story, so we take turns playing reporter and celebrity.
2. Malevolence is born of negative feelings like loneliness and sadness and anger. It comes from an emptiness inside you that feels as if it’s been carved out with a knife, an emptiness you’re left with when something very important has been taken away from you.
3. What makes somebody nice or unpleasant to be around is the way they communicate. When people are fucked up, their communication is fucked up.
4. People who love horror films are people with boring lives… when a really scary movie is over, you’re reassured to see that you’re still alive and the world still exists as it did before. That’s the real reason we have horror films – they act as shock absorbers.
5. Parents, teachers, government – they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.

Ryū Murakami is a Japanese novelist, short story writer, and filmmaker. His best known novels are Almost Transparent Blue, Coin Locker Babies, and In the Miso Soup. According to Wikipedia: ‘His novels explore human nature through themes of disillusion, drug use, surrealism, murder and war, set against the dark backdrop of Japan.’

Source for photograph: By Dimanaiv – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48551977

by Amanda Patterson

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