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 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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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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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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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.
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I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.
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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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Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.
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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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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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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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Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
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The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
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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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Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.
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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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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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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Even 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.
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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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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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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People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.
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What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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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I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I’ve always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO