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Quotes by Kazuo Ishiguro

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
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. It doesn't have to be fully realized, it can be a glancing, shadowy reference to something that you'll come back to later, and then it moves on.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
I can't write these marvellous sentences like Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie that crackle with vitality. I do get a great writerly kick out of reading writers at that sentence level, but I suppose I only respect novelists who have a powerful overall vision. I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
– 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 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
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 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
I felt I had almost written myself into a corner. 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
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
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
I often play little games in my head.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
I really had to protect the relationships that were valuable to me. I had been with Lorna since before I was a writer. We met when we were both working for the Cyrenians homeless charity in London. She thought I would be a failed rock'n'roll star and that we would be miserable social workers as we got older, always looking at job ads in the back of the Guardian.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
I still have a suspicion of charity and think the state has a role to play in many areas. And although for most of the years since I have been a rather privileged writer, I identify more closely than perhaps I should with those social workers. Had I not become a writer that would have been me.
– 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
I think the judging process is full of integrity, compared to some other prizes around the world. The fact that they change the panel of judges every year keeps it from becoming corrupt. I think it's very difficult if you've got judges for life; obviously relationships are cultivated between judges and authors, and publishing houses.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
I used to think when I was in my teens I was very different from my father, but now I see that what we do is probably quite similar.
– 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.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
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
I went many years without even associating Nagasaki with the atomic bomb. Then in the 1980s, when there was a new concern about CND and so on, Nagasaki took on this symbolic value. I felt my Nagasaki had been appropriated. It was suddenly this burning city of ashes. For me, it was where I lived until the age of 5.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
I went through my purple-prose phase in my songwriting... I was really writing between the lines. And that was what I took into my fiction. That was my apprenticeship, really.
– 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.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
I'm only 50, but I certainly feel time is running out for me in an urgent sense. It is not that I will not be alive soon-hopefully-but I realise my abilities might not be there beyond a certain age, and I might become like one of these novelists who are treated respectfully for work they did when they were much younger. I don't look forward to that.
– 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
If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
It is a protected world. 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
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory,.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
My father is not the average Japanese salaryman, and my parents didn't have the mentality of immigrants because they always thought they would go home at some stage. They still very much think of themselves as Japanese.
– 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
Nagasaki is not just a few hazy images. I remember it as a real chunk of my life.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.
– 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.
– 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
People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.
– 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
Sometimes popular films will tap into certain general fears and aspirations of their audience without the audience overtly realising what has happened. So they get the story on its own terms but it has an additional emotional impact because of the metaphorical reverberations. At some level that story taps into something deeper.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
The book was at a reasonably high position on the New York Times... before I was in the country. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if my presence here would push it up or down.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
The idea of a successful novel was something that was reviewed in the Observer and then sank without trace. Literature wasn't a happening thing in those days. Music and fringe theatre and television playwriting were far more exciting.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
The world is crawling with authors touring now. They're like performance artists.
– 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
There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
There was this idea, which felt almost like a conspiracy, that a writer in his 30s was early in a writing life. But I realised you should think more in terms of the length and timing of a footballer's career. Your best chance of producing a decent book comes somewhere between 30 and 45, and I suddenly saw my life as a finite number of books.
– 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.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
Unless you have a real sense of precious things under threat, there would be nothing sad about time being limited.
– 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
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.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
When you are young, things like your moral stance and your political position seem very important. I'd spend long nights with my friends sorting out moral and political positions that we thought would take us through adult life. And part of that would end up meaning we despised some people not for what they did, but for the opinions they professed to hold.
– 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
While it is important to have principles, you have far less control of what happens. These principles and positions only get you so far, because what actually happens is that you don't carefully chart your way through life. You are picked up by a wind every now and again and dumped down somewhere else.
– Kazuo Ishiguro