Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Today’s world is too foul a place for fine and noble instincts.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

153. “In fact, the harder he tried, the more laughable his efforts turned out.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

154. “The fact is, of course,’ I said after a while, ‘I gave my best to Lord Darlington. I gave him the very best I had to give, and now – well – I find I do not have a great deal more left to give.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

155. “Don’t keep looking back all the time, you’re bound to get depressed. And all right, you can’t do your job as well as you used to. But it’s the same for all of us, see? We’ve all got to put our feet up at some point... you’ve got to keep looking forward.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

156. “The obsessions with eloquence and general knowledge would appear to be ones that emerged with our generation, probably in the wake of Mr Marshall, when lesser men trying to emulate his greatness mistook the superficial for the essence.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

157. “Perhaps they hadn’t met for a long time. A long, long time. Perhaps when they last held each other like that, they were still young.’ ‘Do you mean, Manager, that they lost each other?’ She was quiet for another moment. ‘Yes,’ she said, eventually. ‘That must be it. They lost each other. And perhaps just now, just by chance, they found each other again.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

158. “Boatman,” she says. “There’s a tale I once heard, perhaps as a small child. Of an island full of gentle woods and streams, yet also a place of strange qualities. Many cross to it, yet for each who dwells there, it’s as if he walks the island alone...”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

159. “I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

160. “Why should they be grateful? They came here looking for something much more. What we gave them, all the years, all the fighting we did on their behalf, what do they know of that? They think it was God-given. Until they came here, they knew nothing of it. All they feel now is disappointment, because we haven’t given them everything possible.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

161. “I believe I have a good idea of what you mean by “professionalism”. It appears to mean getting one’s way by cheating and manipulating. It means ordering one’s priorities according to greed and advantage rather than the desire to see goodness and justice prevail in the world. If that is the “professionalism” you refer to, sir, I don’t much care for it and have no wish to acquire it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

162. “Some of you will have fine monuments by which the living may remember the evil done to you. Some of you will have only crude wooden crosses or painted rocks, while yet others of you must remain hidden in the shadows of history.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

163. “I’d begun to understand also that this wasn’t a trait peculiar just to Josie; that people often felt the need to prepare a side of themselves to display to passers-by – as they might in a store window – and that such a display needn’t be taken so seriously once the moment had passed.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

164. “It’s nonsense to believe people go on loving each other regardless of what happens.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

165. “This circle of hate is hardly broken, sir, but forged instead in iron by what’s done today.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

166. “I remember a huge tiredness coming over me, a kind of lethargy in the face of the tangled mess before me. It was like being given a maths problem when your brain’s exhausted, and you know there’s some far-off solution, but you can’t work up the energy even to give it a go.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

167. “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

168. “I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

169. “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

170. “She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.” “Well, Colonel, it’s hardly a foreign land to me. In many ways, it’s where I’ve continued to live all my life. It’s only now I’ve started to make my journey from.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

171. “I don’t think it’s any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

172. “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

173. “There’s a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer’s head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it’s going to.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

174. “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

175. “I wish him the very best. All I’m saying is that there are all kinds of ways to lead a successful life.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

176. “When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old, kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

177. “Even at the time, I realised this couldn’t be right, that this interpretation didn’t fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn’t an issue with me. The song was about what I said, and I used to listen to it again and again, on my own, whenever I got the chance.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

178. “Be merciful and leave this place. Leave this country to rest in forgetfulness.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

179. “But who says I’m lonely? I’m not lonely.’ ‘Perhaps all humans are lonely. At least potentially.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

180. “Yes. Until recently, I didn’t think that humans could choose loneliness. That there were sometimes forces more powerful than the wish to avoid loneliness.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

181. “What advantage does it bring a man to be so tall? For every high-dangling pear I reached there’s been an arrow threatened me would have flown over a smaller man!”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

182. “Even so, an AF would feel himself growing lethargic after a few hours away from the Sun, and start to worry there was something wrong with him – that he had some fault unique to him and that if it became known, he’d never find a home.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

183. “Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one’s development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one’s ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

184. “So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

185. “In any case, there is surely no great shame in mistakes made in the best of faith. It is surely a thing far more shameful go be unable or unwilling to acknowledge them.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

186. “The stranger thought it might be God himself had forgotten much from our pasts, events far distant, events of the same day. And if a thing is not in God’s mind, then what chance of it remaining in those of mortal men?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

187. “But you will no doubt agree that the very best staff plans are those which give clear margins of error to allow for those days when an employee is ill or for one reason or another below par.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

188. “I think it’s quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

189. “Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

190. “My donors have always tended to do much better than expected.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

191. “If we’d understood that back then-who knows?-maybe we’d have kept a tighter hold of one another.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

192. “To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

193. “And one has a right, perhaps, to feel a satisfaction those content to serve mediocre employers will never know – the satisfaction of being able to say with some reason that one’s efforts, in however modest a way, comprise a contribution to the course of history.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

194. “But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

195. “I’ve come to appreciate cooking over the years. It’s an art, I’m convinced of it, just as noble as painting or poetry. It’s not appreciated simply because the product disappears so quickly.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

196. “I was wondering, princess. Could it be our love would never have grown so strong down the years had the mist not robbed us the way it did? Perhaps it allowed old wounds to heal.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

197. “A mother’s love for her son. Such a noble thing, to override the dread of loneliness.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

198. “Josie and I really loved each other, that was the truth at the time. No one can claim you misled or tricked them. But now we’re no longer kids, we have to wish each other the best and go our different ways. It couldn’t have worked out, me going to college, trying to compete with all those lifted kids. I’ve got my own plans now, and that’s how it should be. But that was no lie, Klara. And in a funny way, it still isn’t a lie now.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

199. “Where once we fought for land and God, we now fought to avenge fallen comrades, themselves slaughtered in vengeance. Where could it end? Babes growing to men knowing only days of war.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

200. “You built your lives on what we gave you. You wouldn’t be who you are today if we’d not protected you. You wouldn’t have become absorbed in your lessons, you wouldn’t have lost yourselves in your art and your writing. Why should you have done, knowing what lay in store for each of you? You would have told us it was all pointless, and how could we have argued with you?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro