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 ISHIGUROWhat I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I’ve always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
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I want my words to survive translation.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.
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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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There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?
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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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