One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
KAZUO ISHIGUROEven at the time, I realised this couldn’t be right, that this interpretation didn’t fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn’t an issue with me. The song was about what I said, and I used to listen to it again and again, on my own, whenever I got the chance.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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The 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.
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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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The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.
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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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As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
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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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The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
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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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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 discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
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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?
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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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It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.
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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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Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?
KAZUO ISHIGURO






