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 ISHIGUROI grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that’s vanished – the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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 want my words to survive translation.
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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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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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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.
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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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There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
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Memories, 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.
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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.
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It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.
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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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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.
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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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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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One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
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There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
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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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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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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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I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
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To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.
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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 like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way – one solid scene doesn’t have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.
KAZUO ISHIGURO