As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one’s development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one’s ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.
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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.
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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.
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There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.
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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.
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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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Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.
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I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
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She always wanted to believe in things.
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I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
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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.
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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.
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What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.
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I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can’t and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel you can get right inside somebody’s head.
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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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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.
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I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.
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Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.
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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.
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Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?
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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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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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If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.
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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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I try to always go for something very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium.
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I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
KAZUO ISHIGURO