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There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Because maybe, in a way, we didn’t leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and no matter how much we despised ourselves for it–unable quite to let each other go.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Fear Leaving Ourselves Philosophy Quite Stay
We 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 ISHIGURO

Art Evidence Reveal Soul Yourself
You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Love Simplicity Yourself
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Friendship Myself Politics Quite Reason Student Talk Thinking
I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Fiction Greatness Interest Myself
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?
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Blame Forever Live Ourselves Quite
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Light Myself Pieces See
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Frame Memories Myself Novel Remember Thinking Universe
Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one’s development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one’s ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Ability Challenge Development Judgement Limitation Oneself
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Beautiful Calm Feeling Greatness Land
I want my words to survive translation.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Myself Survive Translation Word
I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Book Myself Old Page Sea Thinking
And I’m a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Enough Myself People Student Time
All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Children Growth Trauma
I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Difficult People Story Strange Thinking Time Writing
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Brilliant Effort Move Quiet Understand

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.

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There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.

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