"Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on shore"

from a NYsun article about him:

For Mr. Murakami, running is not only connected to writing in its dark-art aura, it is essential to his literary productivity. It gives him routine, instills discipline, and regulates his life. Ascribing to the Graham Greene, 350-words-a-day-no-matter-what system of writing rather than the fabled Jack Kerouac, wrote-it-on-a-roll-of-toilet-paper-while-drunk methodology, Mr. Murakami commits himself to extreme physical activity in order to pursue pure intellectual activity...

Mr. Murakami's work has always combined the ordinary and the extraordinary, and this memoir is no exception. In his fiction, an elevator ride that starts on the ground floor brings its passenger into a different dimension; a man makes a bowl of spaghetti and his life irrevocably changes. In "What I Talk About," banal description — tying his shoes, picking the songs for his Walkman, feeling a twinge in his knee — sidles up against philosophical inquiry into obsession....while running seems to fall on the bright, healthy side of life, there are deeper and darker drives behind it.

He constantly inspires me to write. And he's a big fan of Dostoyevsky so...