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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.

Kazuo Ishiguro

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Kazuo Ishiguro
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: November 8
Author
Lyricist
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Science Fiction Writer
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Ishiguro Kazuo
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro
Actually
Deception
Rather
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Tell
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Foggy
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More quotes by Kazuo Ishiguro

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There's still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I'm not trying to say I'm not happy with the novels I've written in the past. But it always feels to me like there's another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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The fantasy never got beyond that—I didn’t let it—and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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When I was younger, I didn't read that much. I was more interested in film and music. Now I'm curious. I want to know what it's all about.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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I quizzed him a lot on this point and i suspect the truth was that it was like a lot of things at that age: you don't have any clear reason, you just do it. You do it because you think it might get a laugh, or because you want to see if it'll cause a stir. And when you're asked to explain afterwards, it doesn't seem to make any sense.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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When a man induces his wife to turn suspicious thoughts against her own father, then that is surely cause enough for resentment.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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I realised, of course, that other people used these roads but that night, it seemed to me these dark byways of the country existed just for the likes of us, while the big glittering motorways with their huge signs and super cafes were for everyone else.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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The Booker triumph of Graham Swift's moving, effortlessly profound Last Orders is a vindication of the quiet, much-misunderstood path this fine writer chose to take after the brilliance of Waterland more than ten years ago.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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There was a time you saw me once, one afternoon, in the dormitories. There was no one else around, and I was playing this tape, this music. I was sort of dancing with my eyes closed and you saw me.' '...yes, I remember that occasion. I still think about it from time to time.' 'That's funny, so do I.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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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.
Kazuo Ishiguro