Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “All I know is that I’ve wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I’d get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don’t want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow’s sky.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

221. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

228. “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

229. “And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of 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

230. “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

231. “But tell me, Taro, don’t you worry at times we might be a little too hasty in following the Americans? I would be the first to agree many of the old ways must now be erased for ever, but don’t you think sometimes some good things are being thrown out with the bad? Indeed, sometimes Japan has come to look like a small child learning from a strange adult.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

232. “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

233. “They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstance tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of ‘dignity’.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

241. “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

242. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

244. “When we lost something precious, and we’d looked and looked and still couldn’t find it, then we didn’t have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

245. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

247. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

250. “Not that anything significant started to happen immediately afterwards; but for me at least, that conversation was a turning point. I definitely started to look at everything differently. Where before I’d have backed away from awkward stuff, I began instead, more and more, to ask questions, if not out loud, at least within myself.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro