Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “The English are fond of their idea that our race has an instinct for suicide, as if further explanations are unnecessary; for that was all they reported, that she was Japanese and that she had hung herself in her room.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

402. “We were just trying to create a place for ourselves in a world that didn’t want us... We didn’t have to be the same as them, but we wanted to be part of their world.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

403. “It is important to learn how to fail, to learn how to be wrong in a way that minimizes pain to you and others and maximizes what you can learn from the experience.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

404. “Crystal Eaters by Shane Jones Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa 1984 by George Orwell A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki The Overstory by Richard Powers The Farm by Joanne Ramos The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

405. “But to be frank, there’s much relief around the company. We feel now we can forget our past transgressions and look to the future. It was a great thing our President did.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

406. “We’re going to be leaving here soon. It’s not like a game any more. We’ve got to think carefully.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

407. “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

408. “It’s hard to put the whole world to rights, but let us at least think about how we can prepare our own small corner of it, this corner of ‘literature’, where we read, write, publish, recommend, denounce and give awards to books. If we are to play an important role in this uncertain future, if we are to get the best from the writers of today and tomorrow, I believe we must become more diverse. I mean this in two particular senses.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

409. “I was an engineer, never a scientist.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

410. “What was important to us, as Ruth said one evening when we were sitting in that tiled room in Dover, looking out at the sunset, was that “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 around the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

411. “When I say I wish she’d found out the whole score, it’s more because I feel sad at the idea of her finishing up different from me and Tommy. The way it is, it’s like there’s a line with us on one side and Ruth on the other, and when all’s said and done, I feel sad about that, and I think she would too if she could see it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

412. “He was looking at me in complete innocence and I didn’t know what to say. A part of me wanted badly to tell him what was going on, and I suppose I knew that to do anything else would be to betray the trust we’d built up since the moment I’d reminded him about his polo shirt. And for me to strap up his arm in a splint would have meant my becoming one of the main perpetrators of the joke.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

413. “Then she continued to walk away.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

414. “Firstly, we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first-world cultures.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

415. “You’re much the senior in years, Master Axl, but in matters of blood, it may be I’m the elder and you the youth. I’ve seen dark hatred as bottomless as the sea on the faces of old women and tender children, and some days felt such hatred myself.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

416. “The Giant, once buried, now stirs.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

417. “Why should one not enjoy in a light-hearted sort of way stories of ladies and gentlemen who fall in love and express their feelings for each other, often in most elegant phrases?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

418. “Why did we take away your artwork? Why did we do that? You said an interesting thing earlier, Tommy. When you were discussing this with Marie-Claude. You said it was because your art would reveal what you like. What you were like inside. That’s what you said, wasn’t it? Well, you weren’t far wrong about that. 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

419. “I have come here to relate something to you, Father.’ ‘Then relate it briefly and concisely. I haven’t all morning to listen to you chatter.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

420. “But I could not escape the feeling that what I was really seeing was a weariness with life; the spark which had once made her such a lively, and at times volatile person seemed now to have gone.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

421. “Why write a novel if it was going to offer more or less the same experience someone could get by turning on a television?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

422. “In fact, it is probably this very quality of Shintaro’s – this sense that he has remained somehow unscathed by things – which has led me to enjoy his company more and more over these recent years.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

423. “In a time of dangerously increasing division, we must listen. Good writing and good reading will break down barriers.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

424. “When we were new, Rosa and I were mid-store, on the magazines table side, and could see through more than half of the store window.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

425. “The way you’re always willing to give people a decent chance. That’s a good trait.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

426. “The other cars had to pass noisily around us, but there was no anti-parking sign. Through the windshield, we could see another under-bridge area in front of us, and the cars that passed us were forming a line to enter it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

427. “For they found they became oddly uncomfortable whenever the topic was broached, and before long an understanding had grown between them, in the silent way understandings do between a husband and wife of many years, to avoid the subject as much as possible. I say “as much as possible,” for there appeared at times to be a need – a compulsion, you might say – to which one or the other would have to yield.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

428. “For it was then that I felt the first healthy flush of anticipation, for the many interesting experiences I know these days ahead hold in store for me.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

429. “People who love one another are brought together, even after many years.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

430. “Ask anybody, they’ll all tell you. The evening’s the best part of the day.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

431. “You notice and absorb so much.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

432. “If you can’t find someone with whom you truly wish to share this experience, then don’t!”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

433. “It’s wrong that a man can’t get to see around his own country. Take my advice, get out of the house for a few days.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

434. “The grass was tall in all three fields, and when the wind blew, it would move as if invisible passers-by were hurrying through it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

435. “The war, ghastly as it was, represented no more than “an awkward window in Man’s evolution” when for a few years our technical progress had run ahead of our organisational capacities.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

436. “Mr Capaldi pensava che dentro Josie non ci fosse niente di tanto speciale da non poter esser proseguito. Diceva alla Madre che aveva cercato dappertutto e non l’aveva mai trovato. Ma adesso credo che non cercasse nel posto giusto. C’era invece qualcosa di molto speciale, ma non era dentro Josie. Era dentro quelli che l’amavano.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

437. “This gave us both a little chill, and though we giggled, we didn’t say any more about it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

438. “Car engines were.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

439. “People can get to be a hundred and not experience a thing.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

440. “Though you must understand, it’s still work in progress. And it’s not always easy for a layperson to understand the way these things slowly take shape.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

441. “You see, because it’s stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it’s not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south’ – she moved the pointer up and down – ’they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it’s a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it’s also something of a lost corner.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

442. “Never mind the red-haired woman, Axl. It’s what else we’re not remembering.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

443. “I have found myself continually bringing to mind that picture – of my daughter hanging in her room for days on end. 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

444. “Until recently, I didn’t think that humans could choose loneliness.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

445. “You’re always there, taking it all in. So you know as well as I do. The way she keeps getting at me. There’s no reason a person has to take all that. She pushes it too far, then thinks it can all be fixed with a nice picture. Send the AF over with it. Well she has to understand. Things aren’t always that easily fixed.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

446. “I turned around on the Button Couch, estimating the tension had reached a level that could no longer justify complete privacy.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

447. “She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

448. “In Japanese cities, much more so than in England, the restaurant owners, the teahouse proprietors, the shopkeepers all seem to will the darkness to fall; long before the daylight has faded, lanterns appear in the windows, lighted signs above doorways.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

449. “It was bad luck for poor old Tommy.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

450. “That while it was right to look up to teachers, it was always important to question their authority.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro