"I don’t read reviews. Many writers say this, and they’re lying — but I’m not lying."

"My wife reads every review, though, and she only reads the bad ones out loud to me. She says I have to accept bad reviews. The good reviews, forget it."

Says Haruki Murakami, interviewed at the NYT on the occasion of the release of his new book "Killing Commendatore."

I'm in the middle of reading it. Are you?

You have said that “Killing Commendatore” is a homage to “The Great Gatsby,” a novel that, as it happens, you translated into Japanese about ten years ago. “Gatsby” can be read as a tragic tale about the limits of the American dream. How did this work in your new book?

“The Great Gatsby” is my favorite book. I read it when I was 17 or 18, out of school, and was impressed by the story because it’s a book about a dream — and how people behave when the dream is broken. This is a very important theme for me. I don’t think of it as necessarily the American dream, but rather a young man’s dream, a dream in general.

In the interview, Murakami says he originally wrote the first "one or two paragraphs," then put it in a drawer and waited until he got the idea that he could write it. The first 2 paragraphs are:

Today when I awoke from a nap the faceless man was there before me. He was seated on the chair across from the sofa I’d been sleeping on, staring straight at me with a pair of imaginary eyes in a face that wasn’t.

The man was tall, and he was dressed the same as when I had seen him last. His face-that-wasn’t-a-face was half hidden by a wide-brimmed black hat, and he had on a long, equally dark coat.

The way to continue is that the man without a face asks the narrator to paint his portrait, and the narrator, we learn, is an artist who paints portraits, but only because it was a way to make a living, and what he really wants is to paint abstracts.