Explore Quotes by Kazuo Ishiguro

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

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

I want my words to survive translation.

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

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

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed- why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking.

Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.

I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever.