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 ISHIGUROBut 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.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
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It 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.
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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.
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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.
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The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
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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.
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 think it’s quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.
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As with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.
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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 -
I think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.
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 -
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 -
I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
KAZUO ISHIGURO






