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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROWhat interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that’s been given to them, and find some dignity.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they’re capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don’t care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they’ve done wrong.
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The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.
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Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?
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You’re always in a rush, or else you’re too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.
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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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What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
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There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
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I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
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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 discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
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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.
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All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
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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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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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I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that’s vanished – the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.
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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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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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I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
KAZUO ISHIGURO