Quotes from Kazuo Ishiguro

I wouldn't want to try to adapt something of my own. It would be like going back to school and doing all my exams again.

I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.

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.

When a man induces his wife to turn suspicious thoughts against her own father, then that is surely cause enough for resentment.

I think jogging is bad for your health. All that pressure on the knees and back cannot be good for you.

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

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

If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.

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.

You're always in a rush, or else you're too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.

But then again I wonder if what we feel in our hearts today isn't like these raindrops still falling on us from the soaked leaves above, even though the sky itself long stopped raining. I'm wondering if without our memories, there's nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.

There was something very special, but it wasn't inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.

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

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.

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.

We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed. If I'd known, maybe I'd have kept tighter hold of them, and not let unseen tides pull us apart.

Until recently, I didn't think that humans could choose loneliness. That there were sometimes forces more powerful than the wish to avoid loneliness.

Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.

And so we stood together like that, at the top of that field for what seemed like ages, not saying anything, just holding each other, while the wind kept blowing and blowing at us, tugging our clothes, and for a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us from being swept away into the night.

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

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

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.

A part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and-no matter how much we despised ourselves for it-unable quite to let each other go.