Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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.
Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
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.
Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, thats 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me.
Love isn't about when you first meet. It's about the many, many years you spend together, when you're trying to keep that flame burning.
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.
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?
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.
If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture.
I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.
I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
As with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things
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.
I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.
It didn't hurt, did it? When I hit you?" "Sure. Fractured skull. Concussion, the lot..." "But seriously, Kath. No hard feelings, right? I'm awfully sorry. I honestly am.
Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.
You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
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.
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.
It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.
I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.
Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.
An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.
Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.
There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die.
When a man induces his wife to turn suspicious thoughts against her own father, then that is surely cause enough for resentment.
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.
If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.
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.
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.
I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?
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.
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.
