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 ISHIGUROBecause 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.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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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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I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can’t and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel you can get right inside somebody’s head.
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You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.
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I want my words to survive translation.
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My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.
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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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The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.
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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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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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There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
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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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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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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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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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Even the solitude, I’ve actually grown to quite like. I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I’ll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.
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I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?
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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 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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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO