The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
KAZUO ISHIGUROThere 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.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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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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You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.
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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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I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can’t and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel you can get right inside somebody’s head.
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Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.
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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.
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Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it’s a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.
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There’s still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I’m not trying to say I’m not happy with the novels I’ve written in the past. But it always feels to me like there’s another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.
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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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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.
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I try to always go for something very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium.
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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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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.
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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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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO