You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
KAZUO ISHIGUROYou say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
KAZUO ISHIGUROThere was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
KAZUO ISHIGUROAs a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
KAZUO ISHIGUROWe 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 ISHIGUROWhat is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI think it’s quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI 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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROThe world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
KAZUO ISHIGUROThere comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.
KAZUO ISHIGUROLove 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 ISHIGUROI grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that’s vanished – the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.
KAZUO ISHIGUROYou’re always in a rush, or else you’re too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.
KAZUO ISHIGUROEven 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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROIt 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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROAll children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
KAZUO ISHIGUROYou 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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO