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Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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Kazuo Ishiguro is a Nobel Prize-winning British novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan; his family moved to England in 1960 when he was five. Ishiguro graduated from the University of Kent with a bachelor's degree in English and Philosophy in 1978 and gained his master's from the University of East Anglia's creative writing course in 1980.

Ishiguro is considered one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize nominations and winning the 1989 award for his novel The Remains of the Day. His 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, was named by Time as the best novel of 2005 and included in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His seventh novel, The Buried Giant, was published in 2015. Growing up in a Japanese family in the UK was crucial to his writing, as he says, enabling him to see things from a different perspective to many of his British peers.

In 2017, the Swedish Academy awarded Ishiguro the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing him in its citation as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".

✵ 8. November 1954
Kazuo Ishiguro photo
Kazuo Ishiguro: 76   quotes 4   likes

Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

“Well, this is a surprise. If you aren't here to give me trouble, then why are you here?”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 21, p. 248

“It'll come off. If you can't get it off yourself, just take it to Miss Jody.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 1, p. 11

“Kath, I've been looking all over for you. I mean't to say sorry. I mean, I'm really, really sorry. I honestly didn't mean to hit you the other day. I wouldn't dream of hitting a girl, and even if I did, I'd never want to hit you. I'm really, really sorry.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 2, pp. 13–14

Dreams , Girl

“Maybe she sells them. Outside, out there.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 3, p. 31

“Miss Emily had an intellect you could slice logs with.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 4, p. 43

“Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in – particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.”

Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day

Source: The Remains of the Day (1989), p. 245

Thinking , Time

“nostalgic about their collections.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 4, p. 38

“At least you got him to pipe down,' she said. 'Are you okay? Mad animal.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 1, p. 12

Animals , Madness

“… I must admit, if it hadn't been for the encounter on the stairs, i probably wouldn't have taken the interest I did in Tommy's problems over the next several weeks.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 2, p. 14

Problem

“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.”

Kazuo Ishiguro

On growing up in England, having left Japan at age 5. Conversation with Lewis Burke Frumkes, The Writer http://www.writermag.com/, volume 114, number 5, May 2001, collected in Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, p. 189 https://books.google.com/books?id=lvuteIrz7JUC&pg=PA189&dq=%22there+was+another+life+that+i+might+have+had,+but+I%E2%80%99m+having+this+one%22

Personality , World , Sense , Life

“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."”

Kazuo Ishiguro

... 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.

Rukeyser, Rebecca. " Kazuo Ishiguro: Mythic Retreat https://www.guernicamag.com/mythic-retreat/" guernicamag.com interview. 1 May 2015.

Education , Literature , Reading