Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

My donors have always tended to do much better than expected.

It never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel being seen like that.

She said we weren't being taught enough.

Maybe she sells them. Outside, out there.

I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing." ... I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that.

nostalgic about their collections.

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

Her general drift was clear enough: we were all very special, being Hailsham students, and so it was all the more disappointing when we behaved badly.

Miss Emily had an intellect you could slice logs with.

Tommy's got his shirt on. His favourite polo shirt.

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.

I'd no idea if anyone was actually watching.

Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose.

I have a sense of having just left without saying goodbye, and of this whole other world just kind of fading away. … I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.