KAZUO ISHIGURO QUOTES

“If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.”
“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
“As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”
“You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.”
“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.”
“You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.”
“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.”
“One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.”
“When you are young, there are many things which appear dull and lifeless. But as you get older, you will find these are the very things that are most important to you.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.”
“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.”
“She might be a great person, but life’s so much bigger than just loving someone.”
“Your life must now run the course that’s been set for it.”
“I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?”
“An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.”
“It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.”
“We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.”
“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.”
“Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.”
“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.”