Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes - Page 2

You're always in a rush, or else you're too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.

I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel, world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.

There's still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I'm not trying to say I'm not happy with the novels I've written in the past. But it always feels to me like there's another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

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 want my words to survive translation.

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.

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.

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.

Your life must now run the course that's been set for it.

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.

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.

Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator's memories and thoughts.

You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.

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.

Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.

What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.

All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don't want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow's sky. That's what I want now, and I think it's what you should want too. But it will be too late soon. We'll become too set to change. If we don't take our chance now, another may never come for either of us.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

When I got to 40 or so... I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on, and many that I had no control over whatsoever.

I can see,’ Miss Emily said, ‘that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in the 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.’ ‘It might be just some trend that came and went,’ I said. ‘But for us, it’s our life.

For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. 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?