Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

255. “I believe I have many feelings. The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

256. “Our life together’s like a tale with a happy end, no matter what turns it took in the way.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

257. “One of the boys asked if the fences around the camps had been electrified, and then someone else had said how strange it must have been, living in a place like that, where you could commit suicide any time you liked just by touching a fence.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

258. “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

259. “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

260. “There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

261. “I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

262. “They’d been up to this town called Cromer, up on the north Norfolk coast.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

263. “My mother fell silent for some moments. Then she said: ‘When you are young, there are many things which appear dull and lifeless. But as you get older, you will find these are the very things that are most important to you.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

264. “Might as well tell you. In that shop we were in, they had this shelf with loads of records and tapes. So I was looking for the one you lost that time. Do you remember, Kath? I never told you at the time, but I tried really hard to find it. I remember looking for ages. And when it looked in the end like it wasn’t going to turn up, I just said to myself, one day I’ll go to Norfolk and I’ll find it there for her.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

266. “Do you believe in the human heart? Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and unique? 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

267. “Oji just happened to suggest he had one or two.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

268. “How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

269. “Like you were sad, maybe. And a bit scared.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

270. “One thing I have witnessed is that public life can change people unrecognizably in a few short years.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

271. “I’m sure she barely knew the meaning of loneliness with you here.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

272. “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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

273. “Since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her life.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

274. “My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

275. “Maybe all of us at Hailsham had little secrets like that – little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone with our fears and longings. But the very fact that we had such needs would have felt wrong to us at the time – like somehow we were letting the side down.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

276. “What do you think she’d have said if we’d asked her? ‘Excuse me, but do you think your friend was ever a clone model?’ She’d have thrown us out. We know it, so we might as well just say it. If you want to look for possibles, if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that’s where you’ll find where we all came from.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

277. “But they did eventually set off, with walking sticks and bundles on their backs, on a bright morning of wispy white clouds and a strong breeze.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

278. “The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

279. “Can it be, husband, you still fear the mist’s fading, never mind the promise I made you?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

280. “The Sun, noticing there were so many children in the one place, was pouring in his nourishment through the wide windows of the Open Plan.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

281. “Then he took the sword in both hands and raised it – and Gawain’s posture took on an unmistakable grandeur.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

282. “It was that exchange, when we finally mentioned the closing of Hailsham, that suddenly brought us close again, and we hugged, quite spontaneously, not so much to comfort one another, but as a way of affirming Hailsham, the fact that it was still there in both our memories. Then I had to hurry off to my own car.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

283. “A theoretical chance. Atlas Brookings may make a big thing of it, but it’s less than two percent. That’s all. Their intake of unlifteds is less than two percent.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

284. “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. You’re not like the actors you watch on your videos, you’re not even like me. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

285. “He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted! All those years, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really -one has to ask- what dignity is there in that?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

286. “By then, of course, we all knew something I hadn’t known back then, which was that none of us could have babies.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

287. “The kitchen was especially difficult to navigate because so many of its elements would change their relationships to one another moment by moment.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

288. “Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

289. “Year after year goes by, and nothing gets better. All we do is argue and debate and procrastinate. Any decent idea is amended to ineffectuality by the time it’s gone half-way through the various committees it’s obliged to pass through. The few people qualified to know what’s what are talked to a standstill by ignorant people all around them.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

290. “I suppose I’m saying Josie and I will always be together at some level, some deeper one, even if we go out there and don’t see each other any more. I can’t speak for her. But once I’m out there, I know I’ll always keep searching for someone just like her.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

291. “And I could see the weariness in the boy AF’s walk, and wondered what it might be like to have found a home and yet to know that your child didn’t want you. Until I saw this pair it hadn’t occurred to me that an AF could be with a child who despised him and wanted him gone, and that they could nevertheless carry on together.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

292. “But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

293. “In bantering lies the key to human warmth.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

294. “Kids can be hurtful sometimes. They believe if you happen to be an adult, nothing can possibly hurt you.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

295. “Miss Emily had an intellect you could slice logs with.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

296. “Manager, I did all I could to learn Josie and had it become necessary, I would have done my utmost. But I don’t think it would have worked out so well. Not because I wouldn’t have achieved accuracy. But however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach. The Mother, Rick, Melania Housekeeper, the Father. I’d never have reached what they felt for Josie in their hearts. I’m now sure of this, Manager?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

297. “She told Roy that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

298. “It’s a great privilege, after all, to have been given a part to play, however small, on the world’s stage.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

299. “So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you – of how you were brought into this world and why – and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

300. “It is surely a professional responsibility for us all to think deeply about these things so that each of us may better strive towards attaining ‘dignity’ for ourselves.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro