Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The smart kids think I have no shape. But I do. I’m just keeping it hidden. Because who wants them to see?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

202. “When I was younger, I didn’t read that much. I was more interested in film and music. Now I’m curious. I want to know what it’s all about.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

203. “Sisters are supposed to be people you’re close to, aren’t they. You may not like them much, but you’re still close to them.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

204. “I couldn’t speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I’m regarded as one of their own in Japan.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

205. “I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

206. “Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

207. “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

208. “Resolved not to waste further time on account of this childish affair, I contemplated departure via the french windows.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

209. “That was one reason why we always thought so much about being in the window. Each of us had been promised our turn, and each of us longed for it to come.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

210. “Then of course I found it. I’d been flicking through a row of cassette cases, my mind on other things, when suddenly there it was, under my fingers, looking just the way it had all those years ago: Judy, her cigarette, the coquettish look for the barman, the blurred palms in the background.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

211. “Wasn’t really, to tell you the truth. No shock at all.” Then he went on: “I always told her she should go, told her she should go and find love, you know, true love. She deserves it, don’t you think? That’s where she’s gone now. Off to find true love. Perhaps she’ll find it too. Out there, on the South China Sea, who knows? Perhaps she’ll meet a traveller, in a port, in a hotel, who knows? She’s become a romantic, you see? I had to let her go.” There were now tears welling in his eyes.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

212. “One should realize one has as good as most, perhaps better, and be grateful.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

213. “Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

214. “Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, thats 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

215. “I think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

216. “People aren’t quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They’re not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

217. “But then I behaved badly towards myself, towards everybody. You mustn’t feel singled out. My awfulness was universally distributed.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

218. “In any case, ogres were not so bad provided one did not provoke them. One had to accept that every so often, perhaps following some obscure dispute in their ranks, a creature would come blundering into a village in a terrible rage, and despite shouts and brandishings of weapons, rampage about injuring anyone slow to move out of its path. Or that every so often, an ogre might carry off a child into the mist. The people of the day had to be philosophical about such outrages.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

219. “And it was clear the Sun was unwilling to make any promise about Josie, because for all his kindness, he wasn’t yet able to see Josie separately from the other humans, some of whom had angered him very much on account of their Pollution and inconsideration, and I suddenly felt foolish to have come to this place to make such a request.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

220. “The horror of that image has never diminished, but it has long ceased to be a morbid matter; as with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

221. “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

222. “But Ruth and Tommy never did anything gross in front of people, and if sometimes they cuddled or whatever, it felt like they were genuinely doing it for each other, not for an audience.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

223. “The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

224. “Throughout my career I’ve struggled to encourage people to read my books on a more metaphorical level. I’m less attached to my settings than, for example, Saul Bellow. The setting of a novel for me is just a part of the technique. I choose it at the end.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

225. “I’m surprised someone would desire so much a path that would leave her in loneliness. 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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

227. “All right, so neither of us are exactly in our first flush of youth, but you’ve got to keep looking forward.’ And I believe it was then that he said: ‘You’ve got to enjoy yourself. 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. That’s how I look at it. Ask anybody, they’ll all tell you. The evening’s the best part of the day.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

228. “Then let me ask you something else. Let me ask you this. Do you believe in the human heart? I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual? And if we just suppose that there is. Then don’t you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you’d have to learn not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her? Wouldn’t you have to learn her heart?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

229. “Leave us, you were always on the outside of our love.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

230. “I suppose they have a point though,’ he said. ‘I don’t belong here. This is a meeting for lifted kids.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

231. “Screenplays I didn’t really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

232. “Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

233. “I could put down a scene from two days ago right beside one from twenty years earlier, and ask the reader to ponder the relationship between the two. Often the narrator himself would not need to know fully the deeper reasons for a particular juxtaposition. I could see a way of writing that could properly suggest the many layers of self-deception and denial that shrouded any person’s view of their own self and past.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

234. “But such monsters were not cause for astonishment. People then would have regarded them as everyday hazards, and in those days there was so much else to worry about. How to get food out of the hard ground; how not to run out of firewood; how to stop the sickness that could kill a dozen pigs in a single day and produce green rashes on the cheeks of children.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

235. “Josie just says what she thinks. Doesn’t care if she says the wrong thing. That gets irritating sometimes but I love her for it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

236. “I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

237. “But there is no virtue at all in clinging as some do to tradition merely for its own sake.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

238. “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

239. “Abiding love that has endured the years – that we see only rarely. When we do, we’re only too glad to ferry the couple together.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

240. “It must be great. Not to miss things. Not to long to get back to something. Not to be looking back all the time.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

241. “I think jogging is bad for your health. All that pressure on the knees and back cannot be good for you.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

242. “People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

244. “Rather, debates are conducted, and crucial decisions arrived at, in the privacy and calm of the great houses of this country. 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

245. “We may pray to different gods, yet surely yours will bless this dragon as does mine.” Wistan.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

246. “I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

247. “And when someone’s asking you to do something in such a pleading way, everything goes against saying no. I.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

248. “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

249. “It didn’t hurt, did it? When I hit you?” “Sure. Fractured skull. Concussion, the lot... ” “But seriously, Kath. No hard feelings, right? I’m awfully sorry. I honestly am.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

250. “The fact is, such great affairs will always be beyond the understanding of those such as you and I, and those of us who wish to make our mark must realize that we best do so by concentrating on what is within our realm; that is to say, by devoting our attention to providing the best possible service to those great gentlemen in whose hands the destiny of civilization truly lies.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro