Kazuo Quotes

She might be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone. ~ 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

And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later ... ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

One thing was absolutely certain - it was a given for Kazuo. Although he might not have particularlyrealized it, or more appropriately, perhaps because he was incapable of coming to such a realization, this was what it came down to: he, Kazuo Kiriyama, felt no emotion, no guilt, no sorrow, no pity, towards the four corpses, including Mitsuru's - and that ever since the day he was dropped into this world theway he was, he had never once felt a single emotion. ~ Koushun Takami

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

To some extent, at least, you have to shield children from what you know and drip-feed information to them. Sometimes that is kindly meant, and sometimes not. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Wasn't really, to tell you the truth. No shock at all." Then he went on: "I always told her she should go, told her she should go and find love, you know, true love. She deserves it, don't you think? That's where she's gone now. Off to find true love. Perhaps she'll find it too. Out there, on the South China Sea, who knows? Perhaps she'll meet a traveller, in a port, in a hotel, who knows? She's become a romantic, you see? I had to let her go." There were now tears welling in his eyes. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

That's when I tossed a coin. If it came up heads, I'd take on Sakamochi and...

If the coin came up tails, I decided I'd take part in the game. ~ Koushun Takami

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

The rest of my life stretches out as an emptiness before me. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

There was a time you saw me once, one afternoon, in the dormitories. There was no one else around, and I was playing this tape, this music. I was sort of dancing with my eyes closed and you saw me.'
' ... yes, I remember that occasion. I still think about it from time to time.'
'That's funny, so do I. ~ 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

Every country should have a strong literary tradition of its own at the center, but it should also have an interest in other countries. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I'd lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that
I didn't let it
and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn't sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Throughout my career I've struggled to encourage people to read my books on a more metaphorical level. I'm less attached to my settings than, for example, Saul Bellow. The setting of a novel for me is just a part of the technique. I choose it at the end. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I believe I have a good idea of what you mean by "professionalism". It appears to mean getting one's way by cheating and manipulating. It means ordering one's priorities according to greed and advantage rather than the desire to see goodness and justice prevail in the world. If that is the "professionalism" you refer to, sir, I don't much care for it and have no wish to acquire it. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

But God will know the slow tread of an old couple's love for each other, and understand how black shadows make part of its whole. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I try to always go for something ... very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

As with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

I suppose I do not on the whole greatly admire the 'Tortoises' of this world. While one may appreciate their plodding steadiness and ability to survive, one suspects their lack of frankness, their capacity for treachery. And I suppose, in the end, one despises their unwillingness to take chances in the name of ambition or for the sake of a principle they claim to believe in. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Then he took the sword in both hands and raised it - and Gawain's posture took on an unmistakable grandeur. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Even at the time, I realised this couldn't be right, that this interpretation didn't fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn't an issue with me. The song was about what I said, and I used to listen to it again and again, on my own, whenever I got the chance. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I for one will never doubt that a desire to see 'justice in this world' lay at the heart of all his actions. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

When my own time comes, will I too long for the sea? I think I will be content enough with the soil. And I will not demand the exact spot, but let it be within this country Horace and I have spent the years roaming contentedly. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

For their kind do not know what it is to risk everything in the endeavor to rise above the mediocre. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

In any case, there is surely no great shame in mistakes made in the best of faith. It is surely a thing far more shameful go be unable or unwilling to acknowledge them. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things. When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things, can you? ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

You know, Raymond, when you're at a party, at a dance. And it's maybe a slow dance, and you're with the person you really want to be with, and the rest of the room's supposed to vanish. But somehow it doesn't. It just doesn't. You know there's no one half as nice as the guy in your arms. And yet.... well, there are all these people everywhere else in the room. They don't leave you alone. They keep shouting and waving and doing daft things just to attract your attention. "Oi! How can you be satisfied with that?1 You can do much better! Look over here!" It's like they're shouting things like that all the time. And so it gets hopeless, you just can't dance quietly with your guy. Do you know what I mean, Raymond? ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I was wondering, princess. Could it be our love would never have grown so strong down the years had the mist not robbed us the way it did? Perhaps it allowed old wounds to heal. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

Plenty of couples, they start off loving each other, then get tired of each other, end up hating each other. Sometimes though it goes the other way. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

As I say, the happiness with which the pleasure-seekers gathering on this pier greeted this small event would tend to vouch for the correctness of my companion's words; 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. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I really appreciated having the tape-and that song-back again. Even then, it was mainly a nostalgia thing, and today, if I happen to get the tape out and look at it, it brings back memories of that afternoon in Norfolk every bit as much as it does our Hailsham days. ~ 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

Too many people think only of their own profit. But business opportunity seldom knocks on the door of self-centered people. No customer ever goes to a store merely to please the storekeeper. ~ Kazuo Inamori

When a man induces his wife to turn suspicious thoughts against her own father, then that is surely cause enough for resentment. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

She thinks I've let myself down,' he was saying. 'But I haven't. I'm doing perfectly okay. Endless horizons are all very well when you're young. But get to your age, you've got to ... you've got to get some perspective. That's what kept going round in my head whenever she got unbearable about it. Perspective, she needs perspective. And I kept saying to myself, look, I'm doing okay. Look at loads of other people, people we know. Look at Ray. Look what a pig's arse he's making of his life. She needs perspective. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. 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. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten. Then ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

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

You could sense just from the huge sky, that you were walking towards the sea. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Make no mistake about it, my child, Marie-Claude is on your side and will always be on your side. Is she afraid of you? We're all afraid of you. I myself had to fight back my dread of you all almost every day I was at Hailsham. There were times I'd look down at you all from my study window and I'd feel such revulsion ... ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

Foolishness, sir. How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly? Or a peace hold for ever built on slaughter and a magician's trickery? ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

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

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Our life together's like a tale with a happy end, no matter what turns it took in the way. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Who knows what will come when quick-tongued men make ancient grievances rhyme with fresh desire for land and conquest? ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

And there was a tree stump outside the Black Barn everyone called 'Dave's stump' because for over three years, until a few weeks before our arrival, he'd sat on it to read and write, sometimes even when it was raining or cold. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

One should not, in any case, attempt to make a virtue out of one's limitations. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

Oji just happened to suggest he had one or two ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

And I'm a Hailsham student - which is enough by itself sometimes to get people's backs up. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

It is all very well, in these changing times, to adapt one's work to take in duties not traditionally within one's realm; but bantering is of another dimension altogether. For one thing, how would one know for sure that at any given moment a response of the bantering sort is truly what is expected? One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

She always wanted to believe in things. ~ 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 find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It's only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He's a very international writer. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

This country awakens so many memories, though each seems like some restless sparrow I know will flee any moment into the breeze. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

Looking back now, it's funny to think we got so worked up, because usually the Sales were a big disappointment....But the point was, I suppose, we'd all of us in the past found something at a Sale, something that had become special...and so however much we tried to pretend otherwise, we couldn't ever shake off the old feelings of hope and excitement. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

After all, when we were children, when things went wrong, there wasn't much we could do to help put it right. But now we're adults, now we can. That's the thing, you see? Look at us, Akira. After all this time, we can finally put things right. Remember, old chap, how we used to play those games? Over and over? How we used to pretend we were detectives searching for my father? Now we're grown, we can at last put things right. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

As far as I'm concerned, Miss Kenton, my vocation will not be fulfilled until I have done all I can to see his lordship through the great tasks he has set himself. The day his lordship's work is complete, the day he is able to rest on his laurels, content in the knowledge that he has done all anyone could ever reasonably ask of him, only on that day, Miss Kenton, will I be able to call myself, as you put it, a well-contented man. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

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

There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one's life ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

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

It doesn't matter how old someone is, it's what they've experienced that counts. People can get to be a hundred and not experience a thing. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

For some reason, we called it "umbrella sex"; if you fancied someone your own sex, you were "an umbrella. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

This is the big question that we all have about our children: How much, how soon, do we tell our children the less comfortable facts about the world they're going to inherit? ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I have decided to escape, to defy the shogun. Today I will begin walking the road to hell. But you will choose your own path. So, soon you may be seeing heaven. Choose the sword, and you will join me. Choose the ball and you join your mother, in death. You don't understand my words, but you must choose. So… come boy, choose life or death. ~ Kazuo Koike

I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that? ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

You could say I'd rewritten the same novel three times and I thought I had to move on. The success of the book, and then the movie, had by then also created a commercial expectation and I remember touring America and seeing people in the audiences who I thought might not want to read the books I wanted to write next. My constituency had become broader, but more mysterious to me. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you. Hailsham would not have been Hailsham if we hadn't. Very well, sometimes that meant we kept things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we fooled you, I suppose you could even call it that. But we sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your childhoods. Lucy was well-meaning enough. But if she'd have her way, your happiness at Hailsham would have been shattered. Look at you both now! I'm so proud to see you both. You built your lives on what we gave you. You wouldn't be who you are today if we'd not protected you. You wouldn't have become absorbed in your lessons, you wouldn't have lost yourselves in your art and your writing. Why should you have done, knowing what lay in store for each of you? You would have told us it was all pointless, and how could we have argued with you? So she had to go. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

... my main objection to Mr. Graham's analogy was the implication that this 'dignity' was something one possessed or did not by a fluke of nature; and if one did not self-evidently have it, to strive after it would be as futile as an ugly woman trying to make herself beautiful. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Nos-tal-gic,' Akira said, as though it were a word he had been struggling to find. Then he said a word in Japanese, perhaps the Japanese for 'nostalgic.' 'Nos-tal-gic. It is good to be nos-tal-gic. Very important.'

'Really, old fellow?'

'Important. Very important. Nostalgic. When we nostalgic, we remember. A world better than this world we discover when we grow. We remember and wish good world come back again. So very important. Just now, I had dream. I was boy. Mother, Father, close to me. in our house.'

He fell silent and continued to gaze across the rubble.

'Akira,' I said, sensing that the longer this talk went on, the greater was some danger I did not wish fully to articulate. 'We should move on. We have much to do. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans? ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

for if we're mortal let us at least shine handsomely in God's eyes while we walk this earth! Like ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

When you are young, there are many things which appear dull and lifeless. But as you get older, you will find these are the very things that are most important to you. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

The woods played on our imaginations the most after dark, in our dorms as we were trying to fall asleep. You almost thought then you could hear the wind rustling the branches, and talking about it seemed only to make things worse. I remember one night, when we were furious with Marge K.
she'd done something really embarrassing to us during the day
we chose to punish her by hauling her out of bed, holding her face against the window pane and ordering her to look up at the woods. At first she kept her eyes screwed shut, but we twisted her arms and forced open her eyelids until she saw the distant outline against the moonlit sky, and that was enough to ensure for her a sobbing night of terror. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Furthermore
though it was quite irrelevant now
he had no idea his killer, Kazuo Kiriyama, had, in his mansion that was much larger than Toshinori's home in Shiroiwa-cho, mastered the violin at a level far superior to Toshinori's a long time ago
and then tossed his violin into the trash. ~ Koushun Takami

I don't think it's any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

The Booker triumph of Graham Swift's moving, effortlessly profound Last Orders is a vindication of the quiet, much-misunderstood path this fine writer chose to take after the brilliance of Waterland more than ten years ago. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

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

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. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro