Quotes by Kazuo Ishiguro

About Kazuo Ishiguro:

Kazuo Ishiguro is a 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 obtained his Bachelor's degree from the University of Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University of East Anglia's creative-writing course in 1980.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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 ra...

Kazuo Ishiguro

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

Kazuo Ishiguro

I try to always go for something... very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium.

Kazuo Ishiguro

When I see films made from books, I make a huge effort not to remember the book. It's important to see the film as a film.

Kazuo Ishiguro

I want my words to survive translation.

Kazuo Ishiguro

My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.

Kazuo Ishiguro

I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way - one solid scene doesn't have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 yea...

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.

Kazuo Ishiguro

The world is crawling with authors touring now. They're like performance artists.

Kazuo Ishiguro

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

Kazuo Ishiguro

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

Kazuo Ishiguro

I'm always trying to make something that is impossible to film. Why would somebody just read a novel when they can see it on TV or in the cinema? I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can't and play to the strengths of the nov...

Kazuo Ishiguro

I don't have a deep link with England like, say, Jonathan Coe or Hanif Kureishi might demonstrate. For me, it is like a mythical place.

Kazuo Ishiguro

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

Kazuo Ishiguro

What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that's been given to them, and find some dignity.

Kazuo Ishiguro

We always like to keep our children in a kind of bubble and censor the bad news about the world. We like to tell them the world is full of benevolent, nice people.

Kazuo Ishiguro

This is the big question that we all have about our children: How much, how soon, do we tell our children the less comfortable facts about the world they're going to inherit?

Kazuo Ishiguro

I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the '70s and became disillusioned in the '80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world.

Kazuo Ishiguro

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.

Kazuo Ishiguro

My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn't feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she's concerned, she's just criticising a boyfriend who'd recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels.

Kazuo Ishiguro

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Author Bio

  • NameKazuo Ishiguro
  • Descriptionauthor from the United Kingdom
  • BornNovember 8, 1954
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionNovelist; Writer
  • AwardsMan Booker Prize; Costa Book Awards; Officer Of The Order Of The British Empire