Explore Quotes by 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.

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, I have a very flexible timetable, and 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.