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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROThere comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
And I’m a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I want my words to survive translation.
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 -
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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 ISHIGURO -
I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
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 say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I 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 ISHIGURO -
People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.
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 -
As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
You’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 ISHIGURO -
There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I don’t think it’s any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
She always wanted to believe in things.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.
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 -
I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I’ve always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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 -
All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
KAZUO ISHIGURO