Kazuo Ishiguro quotes - page 4

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)
If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
I loved cowboy films and TV series, and I learned bits of English from them. My favorite was 'Laramie', with Robert Fuller and John Smith. I used to watch 'The Lone Ranger', which had been famous in Japan as well. I idolized these cowboys. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
At least you got him to pipe down,' she said. 'Are you okay? Mad animal. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
... I must admit, if it hadn't been for the encounter on the stairs, i probably wouldn't have taken the interest I did in Tommy's problems over the next several weeks. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one's development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one's ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that? View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
The world is crawling with authors touring now. They're like performance artists. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now. (Kazuo Ishiguro)
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. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
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, that's 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of world, one that she new in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleasing, never to let her go. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
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. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write-with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just. When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about, can you? View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
When Winston Churchill was asked to cut arts funding in favour of the war effort, he simply asked,'then what are we fighting for? View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory. I like the atmospheres that result if episodes are narrated through the haze of memory. (Kazuo Ishiguro)
We always like to keep our children in a kind of bubble and censor the bad news about the world. We like to tell them the world is full of benevolent, nice people. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
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. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed. If I'd known, maybe I'd have kept tighter hold of them, and not let unseen tides pull us apart. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro