The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
KAZUO ISHIGUROThe world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
KAZUO ISHIGUROMy 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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROYou say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
KAZUO ISHIGUROAll children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI 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 ISHIGUROWhen 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 ISHIGUROAs with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.
KAZUO ISHIGUROShe always wanted to believe in things.
KAZUO ISHIGUROMany 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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I’ve always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
KAZUO ISHIGUROAs a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
KAZUO ISHIGUROEven 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 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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROTypically 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