I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?
KAZUO ISHIGUROThere comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
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I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.
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I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
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And I’m a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up.
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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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People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.
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She always wanted to believe in things.
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If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.
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After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?
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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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An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
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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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The Booker triumph of Graham Swift’s moving, effortlessly profound Last Orders is a vindication of the quiet, much-misunderstood path this fine writer chose to take after the brilliance of Waterland more than ten years ago.
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We 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.
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I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
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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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Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
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There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
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Even the solitude, I’ve actually grown to quite like. I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I’ll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.
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Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.
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People aren’t quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They’re not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.
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And 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.
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I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
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What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
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It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.
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The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.
KAZUO ISHIGURO