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 ISHIGUROThe world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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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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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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People aren’t quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They’re not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.
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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 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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All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
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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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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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Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
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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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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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I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
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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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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 ISHIGURO