Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes, Thoughts and image

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

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.

Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?

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

Love isn't about when you first meet. It's about the many, many years you spend together, when you're trying to keep that flame burning.

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.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.

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

There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life

What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.

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

The evening's the best part of the day. You've done your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

Your life must now run the course that's been set for it.

She always wanted to believe in things.

As with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things

After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?

The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.

I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.

What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.

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

You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?

I want my words to survive translation.

Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.

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.

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

Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one's development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one's ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.

Even the solitude, I've actually grown to quite like... I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I'll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.