I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way – one solid scene doesn’t have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.
KAZUO ISHIGUROWhat interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that’s been given to them, and find some dignity.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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Many 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.
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There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
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The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
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You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.
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Typically 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.
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You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
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What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.
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I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.
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As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
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I don’t think it’s any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win.
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Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
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My 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.
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I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?
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There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?
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I think it’s quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.
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