451 Quotes by Kazuo Ishiguro

Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?

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.

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.

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.

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.

It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.

If you make them tiny, and you have to because the pages are only about this big, then everything changes. It's like they come to life by themselves. Then you have to draw in all these different details for them. You have to think about how they'd protect themselves, how they'd reach things.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

It is surely a professional responsibility for us all to think deeply about these things so that each of us may better strive towards attaining 'dignity' for ourselves.