Top 100 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
#1. 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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#2. My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn't feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she's concerned, she's just criticising a boyfriend who'd recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#3. The danger isn't the river's speed, friend, but its slowness.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#4. I remember a huge tiredness coming over me, a kind of lethargy in the face of the tangled mess before me. It was like being given a maths problem when your brain's exhausted, and you know there's some far-off solution, but you can't work up the energy even to give it a go.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#5. 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
#6. Dinner will be served at the usual time and I am pleased to say there will be no discernible traces left of the recent occurrence by that time.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#7. 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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#8. 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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#9. To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#10. Why should one not enjoy in a light-hearted sort of way stories of ladies and gentlemen who fall in love and express their feelings for each other, often in most elegant phrases?
Kazuo Ishiguro
#11. I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#12. My donors have always tended to do much better than expected.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#13. I don't know why, but it didn't seem an option for more than one of us to storm off, and I wanted to make sure that one was me.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#15. A couple may claim to be bonded by love, but we boatmen may see instead resentment, anger, even hatred. Or a great barrenness. Sometimes a fear of loneliness and nothing more.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#16. 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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#17. For however one may come in later years to reassess one's achievements, it is always a consolation to know that one's life has contained a moment or two or real satisfaction
Kazuo Ishiguro
#18. 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
#19. All in all, this is an excellent place to partake of morning tea, but surprisingly few of the inhabitants of Taunton seem to wish to avail themselves of it. At
Kazuo Ishiguro
#20. When we were eleven, say, we really weren't interested in each other's poems at all ... But we didn't know a thing about poetry. We didn't care about it.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#21. There's something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them 'budding' or 'promising', when in fact they're peaking.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#22. 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
#23. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#24. For their kind do not know what it is to risk everything in the endeavor to rise above the mediocre.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#25. Where once we fought for land and God, we now fought to avenge fallen comrades, themselves slaughtered in vengeance. Where could it end? Babes growing to men knowing only days of war.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#26. 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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#27. Then he took the sword in both hands and raised it - and Gawain's posture took on an unmistakable grandeur.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#28. Don't keep looking back all the time, you're bound to get depressed. And all right, you can't do your job as well as you used to. But it's the same for all of us, see? We've all got to put our feet up at some point ... you've got to keep looking forward.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#29. But you will no doubt agree that the very best staff plans are those which give clear margins of error to allow for those days when an employee is ill or for one reason or another below par.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#30. Some of you will have fine monuments by which the living may remember the evil done to you. Some of you will have only crude wooden crosses or painted rocks, while yet others of you must remain hidden in the shadows of history.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#31. When I was younger, I didn't read that much. I was more interested in film and music. Now I'm curious. I want to know what it's all about.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#32. I have this feeling, that all it will take will be one moment, even a tiny moment, provided it's the correct one. Like a cord suddenly snapping and a thick curtain dropping to the floor to reveal a whole new world, a world full of sunlight and warmth.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#33. Perhaps God's so deeply ashamed of us, of something we did, that he's wishing himself to forget.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#34. 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
#35. But then again I wonder if what we feel in our hearts today isn't like these raindrops still falling on us from the soaked leaves above, even though the sky itself long stopped raining. I'm wondering if without our memories, there's nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#36. When it was too late for rescue, it was still early enough for revenge.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#37. Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#38. 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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#39. This country awakens so many memories, though each seems like some restless sparrow I know will flee any moment into the breeze.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#40. I think jogging is bad for your health. All that pressure on the knees and back cannot be good for you.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#41. Today's world is too foul a place for fine and noble instincts.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#42. We have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever we did, we did at the time in the best of faith. Of course, we took some bold steps and often did things with much single-mindedness; but this is surely preferable to never putting one's convictions to the test, for lack of will or courage.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#43. I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#44. One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#45. 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
#46. 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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#47. 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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#48. It was like being given a maths problem when your brain's exhausted, and you know there's some far-off solution, but you can't work up the energy even to give it a go. Something in me just gave up.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#49. Who knows what will come when quick-tongued men make ancient grievances rhyme with fresh desire for land and conquest?
Kazuo Ishiguro
#50. I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#51. Because maybe, in a way, we didn't leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, 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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#52. As with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things
Kazuo Ishiguro
#53. 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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#54. What do you think dignity's all about?'
The directness of the inquiry did, I admit, take me rather by surprise. 'It's rather a hard thing to explain in a few words, sir,' I said. 'But I suspect it comes down to not removing one's clothing in public.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#55. Their points sharpened like giant pencils, completely
Kazuo Ishiguro
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Silence is just as likely to indicate the most profound ideas forming, the deepest energies being summoned.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#61. You're much the senior in years, Master Axl, but in matters of blood, it may be I'm the elder and you the youth. I've seen dark hatred as bottomless as the sea on the faces of old women and tender children, and some days felt such hatred myself.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#62. Your life must now run the course that's been set for it.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#63. The rest of my life stretches out as an emptiness before me.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#64. I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#65. I needed to get familiar with sex, and it would be just as well to practise first with a boy I didn't care about too much. Then later on, if I was with someone special, I'd have more chance of doing everything right.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#66. 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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#67. We may now understand better, too, why my father was so fond of the story of the butler who failed to panic on discovering a tiger under the dining table; it was because he knew instinctively that somewhere in this story lay the kernel of what true 'dignity' is.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#68. It would be the saddest thing to me, princess. To walk separately from you, when the ground will let us go as we always did. Beatrice
Kazuo Ishiguro
#69. And when someone's asking you to do something in such a pleading way, everything goes against saying no. I
Kazuo Ishiguro
#70. If you were a boy and a girl and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you. They sorted it out so you could have a few years together before you began your donations.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#71. It was his reaction when I mention I was from Hailsham. He'd just come through his third donation, it hadn't gone well, and he must have known he wan't going to make it. He could hardly breathe, but he looked towards me and said: "Hailsham. I bet that was a beautiful place.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#72. A lot of the time, how you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at "creating." Ruth
Kazuo Ishiguro
#73. 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
#74. I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?
Kazuo Ishiguro
#75. I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#76. You'll figure it out! You get on your plane and I'll get on mine. And we'll see which one crashes!
Kazuo Ishiguro
#77. After all, if a community could reach some sort of an equilibrium without having to be guided by an outsider, then so much the better.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#78. When the hour's too late for rescue, it's still early enough for revenge.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#79. As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened
Kazuo Ishiguro
#80. People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#81. 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
#82. I think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#83. How so much honourable is such a contest, in which one's moral conduct and achievement are brought as witnesses rather than the size of one's purse.
#Page: 10
Kazuo Ishiguro
#84. Everything suddenly felt perfect: an hour set aside, stretching ahead of us, and there wasn't a better way to spend it. I had to really hold myself back from giggling stupidly, or jumping up and down on the pavement like a little kid.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#85. An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#86. 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
#87. The earlier years - the ones I've just been telling you about - they tend to blur into each other as a kind of golden time, and when I think about them at all, even the not-so-great things, I can't help feeling a sort of glow.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#88. Don't you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?
Kazuo Ishiguro
#89. How often have you know it for the butler who is on everyone's lips one day as the greatest of his generation to be proved demonstrably within a few years to have been nothing of the sort?
Kazuo Ishiguro
#90. You've got to enjoy 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. That's how I look at it. Ask anybody, they'll all tell you. The evening's the best part of the day.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#91. We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they're capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don't care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they've done wrong.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#92. I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that's vanished - the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#93. Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?
Kazuo Ishiguro
#94. What I mean is that we were ambitious, in a way that would have been unusual a generation before, to serve gentlemen who were, so to speak, furthering the progress of humanity.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#95. 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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#96. The stranger thought it might be God himself had forgotten much from our pasts, events far distant, events of the same day. And if a thing is not in God's mind, then what chance of it remaining in those of mortal men?
Kazuo Ishiguro
#97. 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?
Kazuo Ishiguro
#98. There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#99. I thought sooner or later someone would start saying it had gone too far, but it just kept on, and no one said anything. I
Kazuo Ishiguro
#100. How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly?
Kazuo Ishiguro
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