Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

2. “Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

3. “I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

4. “If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

5. “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

6. “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

7. “Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

8. “What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

9. “We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they’re capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don’t care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they’ve done wrong.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

10. “What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

11. “Love isn’t about when you first meet. It’s about the many, many years you spend together, when you’re trying to keep that flame burning.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

12. “It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

13. “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 years apart from it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

14. “It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

15. “You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

16. “My conscience, Sensei, tells me I cannot remain forever an artist of the floating world.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

17. “I want my words to survive translation.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

18. “After all, there’s no turning back the clock now. One can’t be forever dwelling on what might have been. One should realize one has as good as most, perhaps better, and be grateful.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

19. “Your life must now run the course that’s been set for it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

20. “Indeed – why should I not admit it? – in that moment, my heart was breaking.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

21. “After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

22. “I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

23. “Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

24. “But then again I wonder if what we feel in our hearts today isn’t like these raindrops still falling on us from the soaked leaves above, even though the sky itself long stopped raining. I’m wondering if without our memories, there’s nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

25. “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

26. “All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

27. “But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

28. “And why shouldn’t they? Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural. There’s no way I could have gone on for.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

29. “An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

30. “I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that’s vanished – the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

31. “There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

32. “There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

33. “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

34. “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

35. “I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

36. “They accept that your decisions, your recommendations, are sound and dependable, almost always correct. But they don’t like not knowing how you arrive at them. That’s where it comes from, this backlash, this prejudice.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

37. “What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that’s what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they’d really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

38. “Every country should have a strong literary tradition of its own at the center, but it should also have an interest in other countries.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

Featured in: Strong Quotes

39. “It might be just some trend that came and went,” I said. “But for us, it’s our life.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

40. “The best things, he always used to say, are put together of a night and vanish with the morning. What people call the floating world, Ono, was a world Gisaburo knew how to value.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

41. “For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

42. “I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can’t and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel you can get right inside somebody’s head.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

43. “And yet what precisely is this ‘greatness’? Just where, or in what, does it lie? I am quite aware it would take a far wiser head than mine to answer such a question, but if I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

44. “I for one will never doubt that a desire to see ‘justice in this world’ lay at the heart of all his actions.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

45. “For however one may come in later years to reassess one’s achievements, it is always a consolation to know that one’s life has contained a moment or two or real satisfaction.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

46. “Chess is all about maintaining coherent strategies. It’s about not giving up when the enemy destroys one plan but to immediately come up with the next. A game isn’t won and lost at the point when the king is finally cornered. The game’s sealed when a player gives up having any strategy at all. When his soldiers are all scattered, they have no common cause, and they move one piece at a time, that’s when you’ve lost.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

47. “What occurs under the public gaze with so much pomp and ceremony is often the conclusion, or mere ratification, of what has taken place over weeks or months within the walls of such houses.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

48. “It doesn’t matter how old someone is, it’s what they’ve experienced that counts. People can get to be a hundred and not experience a thing.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

49. “Sometimes,’ she said, ’at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

50. “I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how it is with us. It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro