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 ISHIGUROIt 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 ISHIGUROAn artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROThe 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.
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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROYou say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
KAZUO ISHIGUROMemories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.
KAZUO ISHIGUROThere’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 ISHIGUROTypically 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 ISHIGUROThere comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI 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.
KAZUO ISHIGURONow naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.
KAZUO ISHIGUROThe evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.
KAZUO ISHIGURO