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 ISHIGUROEven 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.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.
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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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As with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.
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The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.
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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.
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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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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.
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I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
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As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
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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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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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I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
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She always wanted to believe in things.
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Love isn’t about when you first meet. It’s about the many, many years you spend together, when you’re trying to keep that flame burning.
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You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
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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.
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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.
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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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The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
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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 don’t think it’s any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win.
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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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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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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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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.
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It is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.
KAZUO ISHIGURO