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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

I wouldn’t want to try to adapt something of my own. It would be like going back to school and doing all my exams again.

– 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.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

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

– Kazuo Ishiguro

Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.

– 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.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

I don’t have a deep link with England like, say, Jonathan Coe or Hanif Kureishi might demonstrate. For me, it is like a mythical place.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

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.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

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.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

I’m not at all interested in the brave who fight against the odds and win. I am interested in those who accept their lot, as that is what many people in the world are doing. They do their best in ghastly conditions.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

Even though I spent the first five years of my life in Nagasaki, going to Japan can be really difficult. Even if they know I’ve been brought up in the West, they still expect me to understand all the subtleties of their culture, and if I get it wrong, it matters much more than if a British person gets it wrong. I find it intimidating.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way – one solid scene doesn’t have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the ’70s and became disillusioned in the ’80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world.

– 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

I work very regular hours, roughly 9 to 5:30. I think I have it much easier than a lot of parents. I just sit at home, I have a very flexible timetable, and I’m very fortunate in that I don’t have money problems. I have lunch with my wife at home. I don’t have to commute, so I have much more time with my family.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

I want my words to survive translation.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

People aren’t quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They’re not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

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

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

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.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

When I see films made from books, I make a huge effort not to remember the book. It’s important to see the film as a film.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

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

If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

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

– Kazuo Ishiguro

I’m very fortunate in that I don’t have money problems. I have lunch with my wife at home. I don’t have to commute, so I have much more time with my family.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

I’m always trying to make something that is impossible to film. Why would somebody just read a novel when they can see it on TV or in the cinema? 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

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?

– Kazuo Ishiguro

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

– Kazuo Ishiguro

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