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I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

Kazuo Ishiguro

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
There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Dreams Life Myself Spiritual
When 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

Children Management Parents Person Teacher Yourself
To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Best Myself Proper See
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Difficult Life Myself People Quite Starve Thinking
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
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Fade Memories Myself Quick See Surprise
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

Book Count Death Writing Yourself
It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Disaster Fingers Mistake Move Yourself
Even at the time, I realised this couldn’t be right, that this interpretation didn’t fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn’t an issue with me. The song was about what I said, and I used to listen to it again and again, on my own, whenever I got the chance.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Chance Issues Lyrics Myself Right Time
What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that’s been given to them, and find some dignity.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Acceptance Dignity Interest Myself People
I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

End Myself Rare Start Way
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 ISHIGURO

Fact Fragment Memories Place Time Work Writing
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
I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Creation Interest Myself Novel World
As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Myself People Writing

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

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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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