One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI think it’s quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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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I think it’s quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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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I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
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All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
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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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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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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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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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And I’m a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up.
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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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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 a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
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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.
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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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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?
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
There’s still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I’m not trying to say I’m not happy with the novels I’ve written in the past. But it always feels to me like there’s another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO