As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
KAZUO ISHIGUROThe 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.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life.
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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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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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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.
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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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Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?
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But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one’s past for such ‘turning points’, one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.
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An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
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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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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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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 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.
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What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
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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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I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.
KAZUO ISHIGURO