451 Quotes by Kazuo Ishiguro

It is only when you have discovered the other person's status that you know how to address and treat them.

I went many years without even associating Nagasaki with the atomic bomb. Then in the 1980s, when there was a new concern about CND and so on, Nagasaki took on this symbolic value. I felt my Nagasaki had been appropriated. It was suddenly this burning city of ashes. For me, it was where I lived until the age of 5.

I went through my purple-prose phase in my songwriting... I was really writing between the lines. And that was what I took into my fiction. That was my apprenticeship, really.

It is a protected world. To some extent at least you have to shield children from what you know and drip-feed information to them. Sometimes that is kindly meant, and sometimes not.

Nagasaki is not just a few hazy images. I remember it as a real chunk of my life.

Unless you have a real sense of precious things under threat, there would be nothing sad about time being limited.

While it is important to have principles, you have far less control of what happens. These principles and positions only get you so far, because what actually happens is that you don't carefully chart your way through life. You are picked up by a wind every now and again and dumped down somewhere else.

When you are young, things like your moral stance and your political position seem very important. I'd spend long nights with my friends sorting out moral and political positions that we thought would take us through adult life. And part of that would end up meaning we despised some people not for what they did, but for the opinions they professed to hold.

I used to think when I was in my teens I was very different from my father, but now I see that what we do is probably quite similar.