All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
KAZUO ISHIGUROIndeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
-
-
I want my words to survive translation.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
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 -
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 -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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 -
When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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 -
As with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it’s a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.
KAZUO ISHIGURO