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 ISHIGUROThere 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.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
-
-
I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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 ISHIGURO -
You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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 -
To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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 -
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 -
All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
KAZUO ISHIGURO






