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 ISHIGUROMy 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.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
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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.
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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 discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
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People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.
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It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.
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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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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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What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
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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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I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?
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The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
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There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
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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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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