Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there’s this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture.

And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what came later.

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

I couldn’t speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I’m regarded as one of their own in Japan.

Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.

I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?

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.

I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

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

And I’m a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up.

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.

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.