black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

End Myself Rare Start Way
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

Children Management Parents Person Teacher Yourself
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

Goodness Happiness Head Myself Novel Thinking World Writing
As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Myself People Writing
I want my words to survive translation.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Myself Survive Translation Word
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Book Different People Quite Stand Value Winner
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

Blame Forever Live Ourselves Quite
One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Accident Oneself Quite Truth
There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Dreams Forever Time
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

Break Conversation Move Proper Sleep Talk Travel
To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Best Myself Proper See
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

Life Mistake Oneself Satisfaction
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Fiction Head Movie Novel Thinking Yourself
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

Fact Fragment Memories Place Time Work Writing
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

Light Myself Pieces See
The 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 ISHIGURO

Brilliant Effort Move Quiet Understand

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes