Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

Are you still there, Axl?"
"Still here, princess.

My donors have always tended to do much better than expected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly?

nothing and yet everything had passed between us.

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.

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.

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

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

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

What kind of god is it, sir, wishes wrong to go forgotten and unpunished?

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.

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.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

Abiding love that has endured the years - that we see only rarely. When we do, we're only too glad to ferry the couple together.

Night, and besides, was ably helped by brave comrades." "The comrades he speaks of," Ivor said, "were too busy

The world is crawling with authors touring now. They're like performance artists.

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.

Oji just happened to suggest he had one or two

Dignity' has to do crucially with a butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits.

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

Like you were sad, maybe. And a bit scared.

I think it's quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.

Perhaps God's so deeply ashamed of us, of something we did, that he's wishing himself to forget.

Indeed - why should I not admit it? - in that moment, my heart was breaking.

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

Today's world is too foul a place for fine and noble instincts.

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

If disappointments do come, you will carry on still. You will say, just as he does, I am so lucky.

To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

Can it be, husband, you still fear the mist's fading, never mind the promise I made you?

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.

Your life must now run the course that's been set for it.

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.

Silence is just as likely to indicate the most profound ideas forming, the deepest energies being summoned.

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.

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?

I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.

You'll figure it out! You get on your plane and I'll get on mine. And we'll see which one crashes!

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.

When it was too late for rescue, it was still early enough for revenge.

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

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 ...

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

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.

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

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

If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.

The danger isn't the river's speed, friend, but its slowness.

Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.

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

In fact, the harder he tried, the more laughable his efforts turned out.

Their points sharpened like giant pencils, completely

What's going on here, Tommy? Has Keffers recruited you for his porn patrol?

She always wanted to believe in things.

And when someone's asking you to do something in such a pleading way, everything goes against saying no. I

Democracy is a fine thing. But that doesn't mean citizens have a right to run riot whenever they disagree with something.
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When Winston Churchill was asked to cut arts funding in favour of the war effort, he simply asked,'then what are we fighting for?

Don't you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?

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.

When the hour's too late for rescue, it's still early enough for revenge.

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.

How is it possible to hate so deeply for deeds not yet done?

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

Be merciful and leave this place. Leave this country to rest in forgetfulness.

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.

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

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

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

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

I think jogging is bad for your health. All that pressure on the knees and back cannot be good for you.

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

Why, Mr Stevens, why, why, why do you always have to pretend?

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

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

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

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?

You say you're sure? Sure that you're in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?

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.

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

What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.