"And you know, this thought crossed my mind at the time: maybe chance is a pretty common thing after all. Those kinds of coincidences are happening all around us, all the time, but most of them don't catch our attention and we just let them go by. It's like fireworks in the daytime. You might hear a faint sound, but even if you look up at the sky you can't see a thing. But if we're really hoping something may come true, it may become visible, like a message rising to the surface. Then we're abe to make it out clearly, decipher what it means. And seeing it before us we're surprised and wonder at how strange things like this can happen. Even though there's nothing strange about it."
Chance Traveler, Haruki Murakami (in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman)

"You're going to try to write about a poor aunt," she said. "You're going to take on this responsibility. And the way I see it, taking on the responsibility for something means offering it salvation. I wonder, though, whether you are capable of that just now. You don't even have a real poor aunt."
A "Poor Aunt" Story, Haruki Murakami (in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman)

I'm not bragging about the times I lived through. I'm simply trying to convey what it felt like to live through that age, and the fact that there really was something special about it. Yet if I were to try to unpack these times and point out something in particular that was extraordinary, I don't know if I could. What I'd find if I did such a dissection would be these: the momentum and energy of the times, the tremendous spark of promise. More than anything else, the feeling of inevitable irritation like when you look through the wrong end of a telescope. Heroism and villainy, ecstasy and disillusionment, martyrdom and betrayal...Any age has all these. The present does, and so will the future. But in Our Age (to use an exaggerated term) these were more colorful, and you could actually grasp them. They were literally lined up on a shelf, right before our very eyes.
A Folklore for my Generation: A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism, Haruki Murakami

You abuse me for objec­tiv­ity, call­ing it indif­fer­ence to good and evil, lack of ideas and ideals, and so on. You would have me, when I describe horse thieves, say: “Steal­ing horses is an evil.” But that has been known for ages with­out my say­ing so. Let the jury judge them; it’s my job sim­ply to show what sort of peo­ple they are. I write: you are deal­ing with horse thieves, so let me tell you that they are not beg­gars but well-fed peo­ple, that they are peo­ple of a spe­cial cult, and that horse steal­ing is not sim­ply theft but pas­sion. Of course it would be pleas­ant to com­bine art with a ser­mon, but for me per­son­ally it is impos­si­ble owing to the con­di­tions of tech­nique. You see, to depict horse thieves in 700 lines I must all the time speak and think in their tone and feel in their spirit. Oth­er­wise, the story will not be as com­pact as all short sto­ries out to be. When I write, I reckon entirely upon the reader to add for him­self the sub­jec­tive ele­ments that are lack­ing in the story.
Anton Chekov (via Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose)

In my opin­ion a true descrip­tion of nature should be very brief and have the char­ac­ter of rel­e­vance. Com­mon­places such as “the set­ting sun bathed the waves of the dark­en­ing sea, poured its pur­ple gold, etc.”—“the swal­lows fly­ing over the sur­face of the water tit­tered merrily”—such com­mon­places one ought to aban­don. In descrip­tions of nature one ought to seize upon the lit­tle par­tic­u­lars, group­ing them in such a way that, in read­ing, when you shut your eyes you get the picture.

For instance you will get the full effect of a moon­lit night if you write that on the mill­dam, a lit­tle glow­ing star­point flashed from the neck of a bro­ken bot­tle, and the round black shadow of a dog or a wolf emerged and ran, etc...

In the sphere of psy­chol­ogy, details are also the thing. God pre­serve us from com­mon­places. Best of all is to avoid depict­ing the hero’s state of mind; you ought to try to make it clear from the hero’s actions.

You under­stand it at once when I say, “The man sat on the grass.” You under­stand it because it is clear and makes no demands on the atten­tion. On the other hand it is not eas­ily under­stood if I write, “A tall, narrow-chested, middle-sized man, with a red beard, sat on the green grass, already tram­pled by pedes­tri­ans, sat silently, shyly, and timidly looked about him.” That is not imme­di­ately grasped by the mind, whereas good writ­ing should be grasped at once—in a second.
Anton Chekov (via Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose)

In M--, a large town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O--, a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-bred children, published the following notice in the newspapers: that, without her knowing how, she was in the family way; that she would like the father of the child she was going to bear to report himself; and that her mind was made up, out of consideration for her people, to marry him.
The Marquise of O, Heinrich von Kleist

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going...I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, an then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemmingway

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the light of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves int he presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his "Rinse the mouth -- rinse the mouth" with the greeting of the Deity stooping frmo the floor of Heaven to welcome us -- when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf