It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI 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.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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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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And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what came later.
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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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I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.
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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 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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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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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?
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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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I want my words to survive translation.
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I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
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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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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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The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
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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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What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
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Many 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.
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One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
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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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All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
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Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
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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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There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.
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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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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 think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.
KAZUO ISHIGURO