Ryu Murakami

"One of the photographs in the magazine caught his eye. A homeless youth in New York City. It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition…"

"Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down."

"“You have to watch your step with women these days, Pops. She could be involved with Yakuza or something. Even some of the girls in my class -- you should hear the stuff they talk about. Fifteen years…"

"Buying and selling is the basis of all social intercourse, and the commodity an actor or model offered for sale was nothing less than her own being."

"But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you've worked towards, the life you've carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No on…"

"In the old days, things like tropical fish or imported wineglasses weren’t within reach for the average person. Now when you walked down the street you passed shop windows full of the finest quality g…"

"Advertising departments, as you know, are crawling with people whose frontal lobes are so under developed that if you flatter them a bit they'll swear shit is platinum!"

"To distort our faces with joy, or wail and weep with sorrow, or collapse in agony, or wallow in sentimentality – wasn’t an inviolable human trait but something we can lose simply by leading dull and d…"