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 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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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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There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
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Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.
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I want my words to survive translation.
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An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
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As with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.
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Even 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.
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The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.
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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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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 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.
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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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Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.
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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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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO