I try to always go for something very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI try to always go for something very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium.
KAZUO ISHIGUROAs a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
KAZUO ISHIGUROAnd if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what came later.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
KAZUO ISHIGUROWhat I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.
KAZUO ISHIGUROWe took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.
KAZUO ISHIGUROIt is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.
KAZUO ISHIGUROOne is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
KAZUO ISHIGUROYou’re always in a rush, or else you’re too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.
KAZUO ISHIGUROTypically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator’s memories and thoughts.
KAZUO ISHIGUROMemory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
KAZUO ISHIGUROMany of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.
KAZUO ISHIGUROMy friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.
KAZUO ISHIGUROWe all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they’re capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don’t care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they’ve done wrong.
KAZUO ISHIGUROThe evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.
KAZUO ISHIGUROWhen you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.
KAZUO ISHIGURO