I don’t hang out with the glitteringly successful people; I hang out with people who’ve been friends for many years, and to some extent I feel my worldly success is a bit uncomfortable for them. – Kazuo Ishiguro
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. – 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
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
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 discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me. – 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
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. – Kazuo Ishiguro
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. – 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 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
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. – Kazuo Ishiguro
I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. – Kazuo Ishiguro
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? – 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
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
I think jogging is bad for your health. All that pressure on the knees and back cannot be good for you. – Kazuo Ishiguro
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. – Kazuo Ishiguro
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory. I like the atmospheres that result if episodes are narrated through the haze of memory. – Kazuo Ishiguro
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. – 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
