Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

Author Image

Kazuo Ishiguro

Profession : Author

Birth : November 8, 1954

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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 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

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

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