Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?
KAZUO ISHIGUROYou say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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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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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.
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And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what came later.
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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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I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.
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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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I want my words to survive translation.
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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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There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
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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.
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Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
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I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.
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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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I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
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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’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
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To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.
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People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.
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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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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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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 -
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 -
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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As with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO