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You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.

Kazuo Ishiguro

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Book Count Death Writing Yourself
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Best Day Enjoyment Work Yourself
Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Conflict End Fight Greatness Health Organization
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
You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Acceptance Growth People Process World
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Art Evidence Reveal Soul Yourself
As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Imagination Myself Nature Quite Travel
It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Live Ourselves Philosophy Relationship
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Complete Different Enough Feeling Live Myself Time
It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Disaster Fingers Mistake Move Yourself
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Friendship Myself Politics Quite Reason Student Talk Thinking
Even the solitude, I’ve actually grown to quite like. I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I’ll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Company Feeling Growth Myself Road Solitude
As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Myself People Writing
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 ISHIGURO

Difficult Life Myself People Quite Starve Thinking
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

Adult Childhood Deep Logic Motivational World
I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Alive Discover Imagination Myself World
I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Fiction Greatness Interest Myself
What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Beautiful Calm Wisdom
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
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Happiness Leaving Myself People Problem See Understand
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Essential Interior Memories Myself Person
All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Children Growth Trauma
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Memories Memory Quite Writing
What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Beautiful Calm Feeling Greatness Land
I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Experience Fiction Service Stuff Thinking Writing
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Difficult People Story Strange Thinking Time Writing
I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?
KAZUO ISHIGURO

Dignity Mistake Myself

You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.

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You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes