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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROAs with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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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An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.
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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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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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 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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I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
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There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
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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?
KAZUO ISHIGURO