As with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.
KAZUO ISHIGUROIts was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one’s development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one’s ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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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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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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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.
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If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.
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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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Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
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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.
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What 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.
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And I’m a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up.
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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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One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
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What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
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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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What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that’s been given to them, and find some dignity.
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The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
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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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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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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.
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All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
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I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
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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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She always wanted to believe in things.
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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 felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.
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I want my words to survive translation.
KAZUO ISHIGURO