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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.

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?
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Blame Forever Live Ourselves Quite
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Happiness Leaving Myself People Problem See Understand
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 ISHIGURO

Disaster Fingers Mistake Move Yourself
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Art Evidence Reveal Soul Yourself
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

Acceptance Dignity Interest Myself People
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Brilliant Effort Move Quiet Understand
People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Family Help Kind People Way
I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Book Myself Old Page Sea Thinking
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Friendship Generation Hero Myself Writing
I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

End Myself Rare Start Way
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

Goodness Happiness Head Myself Novel Thinking World Writing
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Chance Issues Lyrics Myself Right Time
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

Burn Flame Love Relationship Togetherness Yourself
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Beginning Myself Search See Start
An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Artist Beautiful Himself
I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Dignity Mistake Myself

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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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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Popular Authors

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