Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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This is the big question that we all have about our children: How much, how soon, do we tell our children the less comfortable facts about the world they're going to inherit?
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I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.
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When I write a novel, I want it to be completely different from a screenplay. I'm very conscious of the difference, and I want novels to work purely as novels. Otherwise I don't see how they'll survive - why don't we just all go to the movies or watch television.
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I try to always go for something... very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium.
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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.
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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.
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It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.
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Her general drift was clear enough: we were all very special, being Hailsham students, and so it was all the more disappointing when we behaved badly.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'At least you got him to pipe down,' she said. 'Are you okay? Mad animal.'
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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.
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There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
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Well, this is a surprise. If you aren't here to give me trouble, then why are you here?
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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.
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Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.
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I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
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The world is crawling with authors touring now. They're like performance artists.
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I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
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My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn't feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she's concerned, she's just criticising a boyfriend who'd recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels.
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Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
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There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.
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If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.