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 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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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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As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
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One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
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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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You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
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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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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 discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
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We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they’re capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don’t care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they’ve done wrong.
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It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?
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What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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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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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I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.
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Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.
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But 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.
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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO